WebCenter Team
WebCenter Customer Spotlight: DDI
Author: Peter Reiser - Social Business Evangelist, Oracle WebCenter
Solution SummaryDevelopment Dimensions International, Inc. (DDI) has been helping hundreds of organizations around the world―including half of the Fortune 500 companies―close the gap between where their businesses need to go and the talent they must have to take them there. With associates in 42 offices in 26 countries, the company’s expertise includes designing and implementing employee selection systems and identifying and developing talent, from front-line workers to executive leadership.
As DDI continued to grow, it experienced escalating costs associated with searching, storing, and recreating critical, expense-related documents for its operations around the globe.
They implemented Oracle Internet Expenses and integrated a new document-capture solution based on Oracle WebCenter Imaging, that enabled the company to overcome the limitations of its legacy system with an open, enterprise architecture that facilitates a flexible deployment.
DDI cut
administrative costs associated with managing paper-based transactions,
as well as operational costs associated with photocopying, faxing, and
couriering documents and decreased its physical
storage requirements & costs. DDI
estimates that it is saving the equivalent of one full-time staff member
in IT management. In
addition, the company gained the ability to track, access, and manage
information more efficiently to assist with regulatory compliance
related to information protection and privacy.
Company Overview
Since 1970, Development Dimensions International, Inc. (DDI) has been helping hundreds of organizations around the world―including half of the Fortune 500 companies―close the gap between where their businesses need to go and the talent they must have to take them there. With associates in 42 offices in 26 countries, the company’s expertise includes designing and implementing employee selection systems and identifying and developing talent, from front-line workers to executive leadership.Business Challenges
The company previously used a third-party system to manage employee expenses, a solution that was extremely complex to maintain, as it was not built on a standards-based architecture. As DDI continued to grow, it experienced escalating costs associated with searching, storing, and recreating critical, expense-related documents for its operations around the globe. Every year, employees spent thousands of hours and the company expended significant financial resources distributing client-billable expense receipts across several departments globally. This largely manual system delayed employee reimbursement and client billing and prohibited the rollout of shared services centers, designed to elevate efficiency and customer service.
To address these challenges, DDI defined following business objectives:
- Advance DDI’s global, shared services strategy to help it to reduce costs, improve administrative efficiency, and expand its ability to deliver world-class talent acquisition and development services
- Enable the company to more efficiently capture and process employee expenses, eliminating manual processes and accelerating reimbursement, as well as customer billing
- Reduce IT complexity and management costs by eliminating custom integrations between the company’s business-critical applications and systems
DDI implemented Oracle Internet Expenses to accelerate
expense report submission, approval, processing, and payment, and
control expenses with flexible audit tools. The solution automated the
approval workflow and accelerated and ensured accurate expense
attribution in client invoices.
At the same time, DDI implemented a new document-capture solution. It deployed Oracle WebCenter Imaging,
a solution that enabled the company to overcome the limitations of its
legacy system with an open, enterprise architecture that facilitates a
flexible deployment. As part of the rollout, it integrated Oracle
WebCenter Imaging with Oracle Internet Expenses. Oracle WebCenter
Imaging operates as an infrastructure-supporting solution, as opposed to
an application unto itself—so the company can leverage it as a shared
service that extends wherever imaging is required throughout the
enterprise.
We are very pleased with the way Oracle WebCenter Imaging enabled us to achieve process efficiencies by capturing receipt images up front and making them accessible to managers and other approvers all along the workflow. We also like that we can retrieve images not only from Oracle Internet Expenses, but also from Oracle Payables, as well as within Oracle WebCenter Imaging itself.
Mike Fieldhammer, Corporate Controller, Development Dimensions International
Additional Information
- DDI Customer Snapshot
- DDI Customer Video
- Oracle WebCenter Content
- Oracle WebCenter Imaging
- Oracle WebCenter Capture
- Oracle Internet Expenses
The Attractiveness of Automated Capture, Scanning and Imaging for Your E-Business Applications
Ok, let's face it. When we bring up a topic like automated capture, scanning and imaging, it might not make your heart flutter. And when we see a blog post about automating processes like Accounts Payable Invoice Processing, I doubt your pulse quickens. But maybe it should! Let me explain...
Today, we have posted a new "screencast" that walks you through a short before and after scenario showcasing how the use of Oracle WebCenter Imaging can slash the costs associated with AP invoicing. It's about 7 minutes long and the perfect thing to watch before you head off to your next meeting. While many companies use Oracle E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft Enterprise or JD Edwards to optimize how business transactions are handled, the handling and management of associated documents and other files are often disconnected. Fixing this problem and driving further efficiencies is certainly a great way to become bit more popular around the office.
Here's how. Many companies are still relying on paper forms, faxes, letters, scanned images and digital content as key elements within business processes. These items should ideally be easily referenced, stored and managed within the scope of the process, but when it is a piece of paper or a fax, that can get very tricky. That invoice might be in a stack of papers on a specialist’s desk over at headquarters. Or maybe that fax with the new contract terms got routed to a clerk’s e-mail but he is on vacation for the next 10 days. You get the picture; the information is in the company...somewhere. But when paper or disconnected and unmanaged files are involved, everything becomes a manual process which of course means it is error prone, slow and likely under a poor level of governance.
That's where Oracle WebCenter Imaging Solutions come in. With native integrations for Oracle E-Business applications, you can automate the capture of documents, images and forms and automatically detect the type of form or document, retrieve line item information right off the document and route it into the appropriate process. And that is where the appeal comes in. When you bring in WebCenter and start improving first one, and then multiple processes, you will start seeing immediate results that drive significant cost savings. Having that sort of vision and eye for strategic business improvement drives recognition and visibility within any company. And who knows what might happen next with your newfound recognition? Perhaps your boss sees your value and gives you that big salary increase you now so clearly deserve. Upper management hears about the difference you are making in your part of the organization and invites you to present your ideas at the next leadership meeting. The next thing you know you are having cocktails with the CEO's daughter on the porch of their summer house in St. Tropez.
Admittedly, your scenario might be somewhat different from this one but when it comes to making significant improvements to the company’s bottom line by optimizing back-end processes like AP Invoicing, the results are proven and tangible. Learning more about how your organization can save money and be more efficient is certainly time well-spent, and just might pay some personal dividends. Check out the screencast to learn more and check back on this blog throughout the week for more information. You may not end up in St. Tropez, but no matter where you work, being smart and saving money is always sexy.
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Oracle’s Global Customer Experience Survey Reveals the Challenges, Strategies and Lessons Learned for Succeeding in the Customer Experience Era
Today's customers are "plugged in" 24/7. They demand instant access to information and transactional capabilities when they want them, are savvy when it comes to making purchase decisions, and are not afraid to change brands if a company no longer meets their expectations.
How are companies responding to the new environment of rapidly rising customer expectations and disruptive innovations like social, mobile and cloud technologies?
Oracle’s recently released global survey of 1,300 senior-level executives from 18 countries in North America, Europe, Asia Pacific and Latin America yields new insights on the challenges, strategies and lessons learned for succeeding in the customer experience (CX) era.
Register now to access the complete research results
Some of the key research findings include:
Brands recognize the significant financial impact
of poor customer experiences, yet struggle to develop and execute successful
strategies. The report indicates businesses can lose 20% of revenue from poor customer
experiences yet many are stuck in an execution chasm.- 91% wish to be considered a customer experience leader in their industry yet 37% are just getting started with a formal customer experience initiative.
- Executives report significant opportunities for improvement when asked to assess their organizations' effectiveness on delivering the experiences that customers expect.
- Executives cite limitations from inflexible technology, siloed organizations and systems, and insufficient investment as the biggest obstacles to delivering the best possible customer experience.
- On average, businesses estimate they will increase spending on customer experience technology by 18% in the next two years. Improving the cross-channel experience and customer analytics are top priorities.
Visit the Global Customer Experience Survey Microsite
******
Are Your Customers Your Biggest Fans?
Hundreds of companies have customers who admire them, but only an elite few have true advocates who are passionate, vocal, and loyal fans. Hear from customer experience expert and author, Jeanne Bliss, as she reveals the five common decisions these beloved companies make that enable them to thrive in good times and bad.
Attend this webcast to discover:
- What kind of decisions earn your company beloved status
- How beloved companies drop the corporate veneer with customers
- Why uncommon decision making can make a positive impact
Register Now
Date:
March 21, 2013
Time:
10 a.m. PT / 1 p.m. ET
Presented by:
Jeanne BlissPresident
CustomerBLISS
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Web Experience Management: The Key to Exceptional Online Customer Experience
Today’s customers expect an experience that is both relevant and interactive across web, mobile and social channels. By focusing on creating experiences that demonstrate how well you know your customers, that promote social interactivity, and that allow for anytime, anywhere access across web, mobile and social channels, you can successfully drive customer engagement, and unlock the door to greater sales and loyalty for your business.
The key to delivering the kind of exceptional online customer experiences that can help drive the success of your business is web experience management. A web experience management solution such as Oracle WebCenter Sites, can empower your business to better engage your customers online. With Oracle WebCenter Sites you can:
Create relevant and personalized online experiences
Today, it’s no longer acceptable to deliver a one-size-fits-all online customer experience. Instead, you must demonstrate that you know your customers by providing them with a relevant and personalized online experience that takes their preferences, behavior and past history with your brand into account. Oracle WebCenter Sites provides you with easy to use segmentation and targeting capabilities that will enable you to deliver a more personalized online experience.
Enable social and interactive online experiences
Customers expect their online experience with your brand to be as social and interactive as their experiences on social networks like Facebook and Twitter. To fulfill these expectations, you must provide your customers with plenty of opportunities to interact socially with your brand. This means incorporating user-generated content capabilities such as ratings, reviews, or comments into your web presence and integrating with social networks by enabling social login and social sharing of information on your site. With Oracle WebCenter Sites, you can easily incorporate social computing features into your online experience to drive engagement and foster community.
Deliver optimized experiences for mobile phones and tablets
The online experience is an increasingly mobile experience due to the ubiquity of phones and tablets. To meet the needs of mobile customers, organizations must optimize their web presence for anytime, anywhere delivery to the thousands of different mobile device types that are available. Oracle WebCenter Sites simplifies mobile delivery be enabling you to centrally manage both traditional sites and mobile sites using the same content, navigation and authoring interface.
Empower marketers to manage the online experience
Empowering marketers and other business users to take greater control of the creation, management and moderation of the online customer experience is a prerequisite for delivering the kind of engaging customer experiences that drive sales and loyalty. Oracle WebCenter Sites puts power into the hands of marketers with intuitive and visual site authoring tools that help you get your online initiatives to market faster.
Enable high performance, global online experiences
Assuring optimal performance across enterprise web deployments is a critical component of the online customer experience. With Oracle WebCenter Sites, you can deliver a highly scalable, multisite, multilingual, and multimedia online customer experience. With WebCenter Sites you can assure rapid, dynamic delivery of high-volume sites, streamline the management of hundreds of sites, manage vast and complex product catalogs with ease, and seamlessly incorporate digital assets into the online experience through rich media management.
Connect the online experience with other customer touch points
Customers expect to have a relevant, consistent and engaging experience across all of their touch points with a brand. Oracle WebCenter Sites can be integrated with commerce, faceted search, portal, CRM, BI and other customer experience applications from the Oracle portfolio to deliver a connected and engaging experience across the entire customer journey.
We hope you enjoyed learning more this week about enabling exceptional online customer experiences with Oracle WebCenter Sites. To learn more about Fusion Middleware, please check out other features in the The New Business Imperative: Social, Mobile, Cloud series.
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As we
saw in Tuesday’s screencast about
delivering exceptional online experiences, today's customers expect an online
experience with your brand that is personalized, interactive and social. In
order to drive sales and loyalty, you need a web experience management solution
that empowers your business to easily create and manage contextually relevant,
targeted and interactive experiences that are optimized for web, mobile and
social channels. Oracle WebCenter Sites can provide you with the capabilities
you need to manage large-scale, global online presences that engage and
captivate your customers.
Ready to engage? Learn
more today:
-
Normal
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false
false
false
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X-NONE
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- See a demonstration of the exciting new and enhanced web experience management capabilities in Oracle WebCenter Sites 11g
- Learn how Ancestry.com uses Oracle WebCenter Sites to deliver an online experience that converts site visitors into paying customers
- Hear what leading industry analysts have to say about the powerful capabilities of Oracle WebCenter Sites
-
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Quarterly Customer Update Webcasts
Quarterly
Customer Update Webcasts
Oracle offers a series of live Webcasts for all Oracle WebCenter customers (content, portal, sites and social) to get the latest info from product management about their WebCenter products.
Next WebCenter Customer Webcast – March 14th / 15th
Join the Oracle WebCenter team as we provide insights into
hot new products and roadmaps that you would want to consider for your
WebCenter deployment. With Social
Computing and Mobility being 2 of the hottest topics in the industry, we
would like to present WebCenter's offerings in these areas. This next Oracle WebCenter Quarterly
Customer Update Webcast is scheduled to air on March 14th (March 15th in
Asia Pacific). We will also be sharing the latest product updates and key
support announcements that all WebCenter professionals and solution
owners need to know.
Don’t miss out on getting the latest information. There will be two live sessions with Q&A at the end of each session.
Register for Session 1 - March 14th 9am
San Francisco, 12nn New York, 4pm London
Register for Session 2 – March 15th
9am Singapore, 12nn Sydney, (14h) 6pm San Francisco
Stay informed: The Oracle WebCenter Alerts blog keeps you up to date on the latest product information
- such as new releases, samples, events, integrations and certification
updates.Subscribe via
RSS or Email.
Register for
Session 1
Mar 14th 9am San
Francisco
12pm New York
4pm London
Register for
Session 2
Mar 14th 6pm San
Francisco
Mar 15th 9am Singapore
The Online Customer Experience Challenge
Web, mobile and social channels have ushered in what Altimeter analyst, Brian Solis, referred to in a recent Oracle WebCenter Social Business Thought Leaders webcast as connected consumers. These connected consumers have more choices, influence and access to online information than ever before. Engaging these customers and earning their sales and loyalty can be a great challenge.
Customers decide how, when, and where they want to engage with your brand--whether it's in the store, over the phone or on the web. They expect you to know who they are and what they need, and to seamlessly recognize them at every touch-point.
Newer channels like social and mobile have significant implications on how customers engage with organizations online and what businesses need to do manage the online channel more efficiently and effectively. Social networking has amplified the customer's voice and peers now have greater influence over buying decisions than traditional marketing. The pervasiveness of cell phones and tablets has also turned the online customer experience into an increasingly mobile experience, bringing with it new challenges for engaging always connected customers who are accessing the online channel with an ever increasing variety of mobile devices. As a result the power has shifted from brands to customers, and the delivery of an engaging online customer experience has become a great challenge for businesses today.
We invite you to learn how you can start engaging these connected customers through exceptional online experiences by viewing this screencast from the New Business Imperative: Social, Mobile, Cloud Series.
Improve Customer Satisfaction with Self-Service Portals
We’ve spent quite a bit of time this week discussing how to deliver effective customer engagement through self-service portals. As you know, customer self-service is now the channel of choice for today's customers. They expect a customer self-service portal that provides a convenient way to post service issues, place new orders, or view their order histories. A customer portal lets you stay open for business 24/7 around the world and delivers a high-quality, high-touch experience for customers while reducing the cost of customer care.
If you haven’t viewed our screencast already, we invite you to watch to see how a self-service portal will:
- Empower customers with unprecedented control over their purchase decisions,
- Provide real-time access to such data as order status, order status tracking and return authorizations,
- Drive more return visits and greater customer loyalty
The Top 3 Things you Need to Know about Customer Engagement & Experience
- Connect and engage. Ensure that your customers can get to you whenever, however, and wherever they desire. Create simple, consistent, and relevant experiences across all touchpoints and interactions. Tailor digital interactions based on behavior, intent, and known preferences and optimize experiences for different devices and modes of interaction.
- Know more. Get as much information as you can about your customers prior to the current interaction. Having the right information at the right time improves your ability to retain customers and have them become repeat buyers. Personalize content, messages, and offers based on real-time decisions and recommendations using analytic insights such as “next likely purchase” and “next best action.”
- Make it easy and rewarding. Improve efficiency and accuracy with cross-channel order orchestration and fulfillment. Enable “anywhere, anytime” interactions with intelligent self-service and at-the-point-of-need assistance. Proactively engage customers directly in social networks and reward best customers for total lifetime value, including referral value.
Engage Customers with Social, Mobile and Cloud Self-Service
We all know that successfully engaging customers is critical to an organization’s business success. We also know that engaging our customers is more challenging today than ever before. Over the last decade and a half we’ve seen the advent of the internet and watched as the online channel became a primary one for conducting our business and even managing our lives. And during this whole process or evolution, the customer journey has grown increasingly complex. Customers themselves have assumed increasing power and influence over the purchase process and for setting the tone and pace of the relationships they have with brands and you see the evidence of this in the really high expectations that customers have today. They expect brand experiences that are personalized and relevant -- In other words they want experiences that demonstrate that the brand understands their interests, preferences and past interactions with them. They also expect their experience with a brand and the community surrounding it to be social and interactive– it’s no longer acceptable to have a static, one-way dialogue with your customer base or to fail to connect your customers with fellow customers, or with your employees and partners. And on top of all this, customers expect us to deliver this rich and engaging, personalized, interactive and cloud-based experience, in a consistent way cross a variety of channels including web, mobile and social channels, in the cloud or even in offline ones such as in-store or via a call center. And as a result, we see that deliver on these expectations and successfully engaging your customers is a great challenge today.
And while it’s a significant challenge for organization, there are many benefits to successfully engaging your customers: Engaged customers are more likely to:
- Purchase your products and services.
- Be loyal to a brand over the long term through the purchase of additional products and services.
- Become a brand advocate and recommend a business’s products and services -- and will all know how important customer endorsements such as ratings and review have become today.
- Pay more for a great customer experience. In fact, a whopping 86% of consumers say that they are willing to pay more for a better customer experience.
Failing to engage customers doesn’t just mean losing a sale; it could have a significant long term negative side effect. Failing to engage customers and failing to deliver great customer experiences, companies are doing much more than simply leaving additional revenue on the table. Today there can be real consequences for failing to deliver on customer expectations. Today’s demanding customers won’t hesitate to drop your brand in the wake of a poor experience. In fact 89% of consumers say they will do business with your competitor following a poor experience with you. And the consequences are even higher than losing that one customer to your competitor in today’s social and connected world. Your unhappy customers can easily amplify their displeasure and chip away at your brand‘s reputation via their social networks or through the posting of negative reviews on sites like Yelp or Google Places.
So, how do you use social, mobile and cloud self-service to effectively engage your customers and employees? How do you provide them with personalized, integrated, application-oriented and mutli-channel access to improve satisfaction and productivity? Oracle WebCenter is the engagement platform powering exceptional experiences for employees, partners and customers. It brings together people, processes, and information to deliver social, mobile and cloud based self-service solutions. We invite you to view this screencast as part of the New Business Imperative: Social, Mobile, Cloud Series to find out how Oracle WebCenter allows you to engage your customers, improve employee satisfaction and increase partner efficiency.
Engagement: Don't Forget Your Customers!
This week we want to focus on Customer Engagement, and how it is critical to your business. Today we hear and read a great deal about “Customer Engagement” – and rightly so, it is those customers, whether they be traditional paying customers, citizens, students, club members, or whomever it is that are “paying the bills”. A more engaged customer is more likely to make it easier to pay those bills by buying more, giving good reviews, or spreading the word of how wonderful their experience was. Is your organization ready to handle today’s demands and high expectations for a socially enabled, multichannel online customer experience? In order to succeed in today’s competitive global online world, organizations must be able to create a relevant and interactive cross-channel experience that will drive the success of their marketing and customer initiatives.
Customers themselves have assumed increasing power and influence over the purchase process and for setting the tone and pace of the relationships they have with brands and you see the evidence of this in the really high expectations that customers have today. And the numbers don’t lie:
- 86% of consumers say that they are willing to pay more for a better customer experience
- Companies with low levels of employee engagement have total shareholder returns that are lower than the average by 28%
- Organizations with high levels of employee engagement outperform the total stock market index by 22%
- 89% of customers will begin doing business with a competitor following a poor customer experience
Would these percentages be higher or lower for your organization? Are you successfully engaging your customers? We hope you will stay tuned this week for some exciting new offers we have around Customer Engagement! In the meantime, we invite you to download this free report by the Temkin Group that measures engagement across more than 2,400 constituents.
Engage Your Customers. Empower Your Business. Do More with Your Minutes.
We live in very social times – in 60 seconds in today’s online world, we see 695,000 new searches on Google while 72 hours of new video is uploaded to YouTube. We send 11 million instant messages and tweet 98,000 times. There are 1389 new blog postings and 695,000 new status updates to facebook. Meanwhile, Instagram gets 3480 new photos uploaded.
Some of these figures may seem large, some may seem small, but they all show a trend for more - More - MORE as the population becomes ever more engaged with our social media world.
We see staggering statistics of social media usage across the globe – in 2011 YouTube had more than 1 TRILLION views or to put this in relative terms that would translate to 140 views for every person on the planet Earth. Over 4 billion hours of video are watched each month on YouTube. Facebook has 845 million active users that create 3.2 billion likes and comments every day. Facebook users spend an average of 6 hours, 35 minutes per month on the site. Facebook has reached 100 billion friendships. There are 250 million photos uploaded each day = 173,611/minute. Let’s face the facts – we are all hooked on socially engaging via the latest and greatest tools available.
Are you giving your customers, employees and partners the best online experience they have come to expect from their personal lives?
ARE YOU ENGAGING EVERYONE WITH EXCEPTIONAL EXPERIENCES?
Not to mention that this also usually includes managing huge QUANTITIES of business data, while replicating the QUALITY of the social media experience.
So then, how do you manage the qualities of a business – including data and interaction and replicate the quality of the social media experience?
#DoMoreWithOracle – we can certainly help! Check out the full week of Fusion Middleware Screencasts
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Sources:
http://www.youtube.com/t/press_statistics/
http://www.digitalbuzzblog.com/infographic-instagram-stats/
http://thesocialskinny.com/100-more-social-media-statistics-for-2012/
http://www.mediabistro.com/alltwitter/social-media-stats-2012_b30651
DO MORE WITH ORACLE WEBCENTER
DO MORE WITH ORACLE WEBCENTER
Whether you’ve established a content infrastructure and you’re ready to build solutions on top; or if you have tactical needs to solve specific business problems, Oracle WebCenter provides out of the box applications and a feature-rich foundation to meet your needs.
The more you plug into key applications and use cases, the more value your content infrastructure provides to the enterprise. Extend your reach, your ROI, and your value to your organization. Set the stage for future innovation.
Enable
Employees, Partners, and Customers to Do More With Oracle WebCenter
Did you know that, in addition to enterprise content management, Oracle WebCenter also includes comprehensive portal, composite application, collaboration, and Web experience management capabilities?
Does Oracle power your portal solution for intranets, self-service portals or community websites? If so, did you know that Oracle WebCenter now also includes comprehensive content, web experience management and social computing capabilities?
Are you providing your customers with engaging online experiences using Oracle? If so, you probably realize that there’s more to exceptional customer engagement than just Web experience management. You must also empower your business by engaging and enabling employees and partners to deliver on customers’ expectations.
Now you can do more with WebCenter than ever before by creating advanced customer facing web solutions to improve customer loyalty and sales by delivering contextual and targeted multi-channel experiences to users across mobile, social and web channels. And you can manage the entire content lifecycle of not just the content in your portals but across your entire company as well.
Join us for this On Demand Series of 3 Webcasts and learn how you can provide a new level of engagement.
Learn how to Do More with Oracle WebCenter:
- Do More with Oracle WebCenter – Expand Beyond Content Management
- Do More with Oracle WebCenter - Expand Beyond Web Experience Management
- Do More with Oracle WebCenter: Expand Beyond Portals
Learn more about how WebCenter:
- Drives task-specific application data and content to a single screen for executing specific business processes
- Enables mixed internal and external environments where content can be securely shared and filtered with employees, partners, and customers, based upon role-based security
- Offers Web experience management, driving contextually relevant, social, and interactive online experiences across multiple channels
- Provides social features that enable sharing, activity feeds, collaboration, expertise location, and best-practices communities
- Drives sales and loyalty with an engaging cross-channel online experience
- Enables self-service extranets, intranets and custom application dashboards
- Enhances productivity with social collaboration
- Optimizes information access with content management
- Enables the social business by coordinating collaboration inside and outside the enterprise
- Improves the online experience by delivering targeted multi-channel customer experiences
- Manages the complete content lifecycle across all websites, applications and social tools on a strategic enterprise content management platform
What businesses sometimes forget, is that to truly engage your customers, you must also first enable and engage your partners and employees.
Do More with WebCenter, the user engagement platform for social business.
Watch Now: Do More with Oracle WebCenter Series
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Got a Minute?
Got a Minute?
How much did anyone get done in a minute, an hour or a day in
1953? 1973? 1983? 1993? 2003? For those that have been around a while, we’ve certainly
witnessed the increased velocity with which today’s business operates in 2013.
And when we find ourselves catching our breath some days, we can understand that June and Ward Cleaver didn’t have a Smartphone in their pocket allowing Wally and the Beaver a slower lifestyle and larger global unknown world. Maybe the Beaver wouldn’t have gotten into so much trouble if June had been tracking him via his cell phone GPS.
I won’t wane on nostalgically (too much) about the “good ‘ol days”
in fictitious suburbia when we actually waited for the US mail to deliver our
packages and correspondence or we had to be in an office or find a payphone to
make a call outside of the home. 
As the
world has evolved due to the rapid speed of communications, it has become a much
smaller place – or at least our perception of the world has shrunk to fit in
our shirt pocket.
Given the right timing, there are no barriers to easily asking a
colleague across the world in Australia, Japan, India, or France a quick
question to clarify something that would have taken days or even weeks decades
ago. We are living in a new technology-based world with “Digital
Darwinism” in full force. Those new employees joining your ranks that
were born with a computer in their hands, the “Digital Natives” or “Born
Digital” as they are known are arriving with new expectations for the
integration of their work and personal lives. They are social beings and are
arriving having become accustomed to multiple tools for instantaneous
communications, intuitive collaboration at all hours; a different perspective
on what is public vs. private and the expectation that the digital tools that
they will use in their employment will be just as easy to use as those in their
personal lives. They also bring to the workplace the growing expectation that
everything in life is social, can be done while mobile, and ultimately, come
from the cloud…
Today’s customer expects to engage with your brand and the community surrounding it in an interactive and social way. Customers expect a lot for their online customer experience.
They expect it to be personal:
• Accessible: - Regardless of my device – Mobile or not - Via my existing online identities
• Relevant: Content that interests me
• Customized: To be able to tailor my online experience
They expect is to be engaging:
• Social: So I can share content with my social networks
• Intuitive: To easily find what I need
• Interactive: So I can interact with online communities
And they expect it to be consistent across the online experience.
Interestingly enough, the business priorities of decades ago are still at play today. Do you need to Lower Costs? Increase Sales? Raise Productivity? Foster Innovation? Deliver a product or a service faster, better and cheaper? At least some things haven’t changed, but the tools by which we accomplish these goals are constantly changing and improving, providing the experience to increase engagement of your employees, customers and partners. Got a Minute? Take a look at how much happens in just 60 seconds and how your organization compares.
Join us in Denver at Collaborate 13! April 7-11, 2013
The Collaborate 13 event is coming up soon. This annual event is created and run by a collection of the world's largest Oracle User Groups. The Oracle WebCenter team will be participating at this event and want you to be aware of the variety of WebCenter focused activities and sessions that will be available. Here is some additional information from the Collaborate 13 team.
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The Latest and Greatest in Oracle WebCenter Training and Education: By and For Users!
COLLABORATE 13 features over 1,208 sessions in total - with 35 sessions plus 3 deep dive sessions fully dedicated to WebCenter and how to optimize and manage your Oracle WebCenter implementations. Hear from Oracle customers, product managers, partners, on their experiences with:
· WebCenter upgrades
· User provisioning
· Workflow
· Integration
· and more!
The COLLABORATE 13 WebCenter page (http://collaborate13.ioug.org/webcenter ) has the full scoop on COLLABORATE programs and great sessions dedicated to Oracle WebCenter. Head to the registration page to take advantage of the lowest COLLABORATE 13 registration rates, before they’re gone. Act now to take advantage of nearly $500 worth of savings: time is running out!
Include COLLABORATE 13 in your training plans for 2013- and win! Get entered into the WebCenter SIG drawing for prizes just by attending any WebCenter session. The more WebCenter sessions you attend, the better your odds of winning an Apple iPad 3!
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We hope to see you there!
The Oracle WebCenter Team
I am a customer
I am a customer
Allow me to introduce myself. I am a customer.
I am the person that makes the economic engine turn. I am the reason you take home a paycheck. I am the reason you are able to feed your family, pay your mortgage, go on vacation, buy a car, and contribute to your church or synagogue. Because of me, gigantic corporations and small businesses alike have risen and flourished. Because of my absence, they have faded from existence.
The roads you drive on, the police and fireman that protect your community, the teachers that teach your children all exist because of me. Politicians and postal workers, sanitation workers and soldiers all owe their jobs to me. Without me, no taxes would be paid and any and all societal advances would come to a halt.
The wise come to know, respect, and love me. The foolish disregard my importance and suffer accordingly.
By the way, you’ll notice that I didn’t introduce myself as your customer. That’s because I don’t belong to you. Even if I make a purchase from you, that doesn’t mean that I will do it again in the future. You are always on trial and I am always evaluating, measuring, and testing your product and service.
So pay attent
ion to me. Get to know me. Learn my habits. My likes. My dislikes.
My desires. My dreams. My values. Learn my language. Learn to recognize my
moods.
Above all, treat me with respect. I will not be ill-treated, and why should I be? There are too many businesses vying for my attention. Every time you turn on the television, open a newspaper, or listen to the radio, you see and hear multitudes of companies competing for my attention. There are too many people who are willing to treat me right in exchange for my business.
And know this, I am not easily fooled. Businesses treat me right or suffer the consequences. Sooner or later I always discover dishonesty, disrespect, or disinterest. Most of the time, I don’t announce my displeasure. I simply take my business elsewhere.
Occasionally, we will have disagreements. I don’t like mistakes but I understand that you sometimes make them. The manner in which you handle my complaint determines any future interaction I have with you. And, in my mind, it also determines the character of your business. I rarely ever give you a second chance to make the same mistake twice.
So, watch for me in your business community. If you’re fortunate enough to see me, do everything in your power to woo me and make me your own, because I hold the key to your financial success. It is no exaggeration to say that when you interact with me, your future hangs in the balance.
Learn me. Know me.
I am a customer.
© 2012 Charles Marshall. Charles Marshall is a nationally known humorous motivational speaker and author.
Visit his Web site at www.charlesmarshall.net or contact him via e-mail at charles@charlesmarshall.net.
WebCenter Customer Spotlight: News Limited
Author: Peter Reiser - Social Business Evangelist, Oracle WebCenter
Solution Summary
News Limited is one of Australia's largest media conglomerate companies, employing more than 8,000 staff nationwide and approximately 3,000 journalists.
Their key challenges were to publish news quickly by non-technical authors, innovate new services faster and handle the very high traffic volume & peak loads of their websites.
News Limited implemented a highly scalable Web Content Management Solution (WCM) based on Oracle WebCenter Sites which is now running around 60% of Australia's newspapers.
News Limited is now able to basically re-imagine the story telling process of online news that is not only faster in terms of editorial publishing activity (speed-to-screen) but also one that allows to create higher quality stories.
Non technical users can quickly create & publish up to 2,000 stories per day within a guaranteed publish time of maximum 90 seconds.
At peak time they have up to 300 editors on the system and reach up to 80,000 page hits per second.
Company Overview
News Limited is one of Australia's largest media conglomerate companies, employing more than 8,000 staff nationwide and approximately 3,000 journalists. The publicly listed company's interests span newspaper and magazine publishing, Internet, Pay TV, market research, DVD and film distribution, and film and television production trading assets. News Limited owns approximately 146 daily, Sunday, weekly, bi-weekly and tri-weekly newspapers, of which three are free commuter titles and 102 are suburban publications (including 16 of which News Limited has a 50% interest).
Business Challenges
The world of online news is very competitive and News Limited wanted to stay on the cutting edge and lead this category with an engaging online experience. With the previous Content Management Systems they were not able to publish news quickly (speed-to-screen) nor were they able to innovate as quickly as they wanted and operationally it was getting difficult and expensive to maintain.
Solution Deployed
News Limited implemented a highly scalable Web Content Management Solution (WCM) based on Oracle WebCenter Sites which is now running around 60% of Australia's newspapers on this shared platform. The system runs on Java based application servers utilizing local and remote (CDN) cache technologies.
Business Results
- News Limited is now able to basically re-imagine the story telling process of online news and implement a solution that is not only faster in terms of editorial publishing activity (speed-to-screen) but also one that allows to create higher quality stories through content “wizards” and proprietary algorithms.
- From an editorial perspective it makes it very easy for their non technical users to create & publish content and maintain the overall web properties.
- News Limited now publishes up to 2,000 stories per day within a garantied publish time of maximum 90 seconds.
- At peak they have up to 300 editors on the system and reach up to 80,000 page hits per second.
Additional Information
Importance of Page-Fragment Caching in Enabling High Performance Websites
Today's guest blog post is from Mariam Tariq, Senior Director of Product Management for Oracle WebCenter Sites. Mariam has worked in the technology space for over 15 years with a focus in web content management, social marketing, and mobility. She has also held roles in product management, strategy and engineering at Zenprise, Interwoven, and Scientific Atlanta. Mariam holds BS and MS degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and an MBA from the University of California at Berkeley.
For most organizations, the online channel is a significant customer touch point which continues to grow in importance year after year. Delivering a highly responsive website with no downtime ensures there is neither revenue loss nor poor customer experience. A caching subsystem is a central part of the website delivery system needed to achieve high performance.
While page-level caching is essential for performance, further caching at a fragment level enables dynamic delivery of the website such that pages can be assembled at runtime when incoming requests are received. This is especially critical to delivering targeted websites where different users see different content on a page based on his/her visitor attributes such as location, time of day, or registered preferences. It is much more efficient to recompute only the fragments of the page that are different rather than the entire page, as typically only small amounts of data on a page will change.
Oracle WebCenter Sites is a Web Content Management system capable of this type of high scale dynamic delivery. In WebCenter Sites, efficient dynamic delivery is made possible by keeping track of changes to individual web components and dependencies between them. This is followed by just-in-time page assembly and caching of discrete fragments at the edge of the network. As a result, even when data is managed in traditional relational databases, the page delivery model scales to serve a very high throughput site with a reasonably small hardware footprint.
WebCenter Sites provides two layers of caching known as double-buffered caching: Sites Server cache and Satellite Server cache. Sites Servers are the core servers that can publish to Satellite Servers. Satellite Servers are remote servers that provide distributed caching and are first to receive the client requests. A typical deployment topology is shown below. If the requested page is not in the Satellite Server cache, it is requested from WebCenter Sites. If WebCenter Sites does not have the page in its cache, it regenerates it and sends it to Satellite Server.
Figure: Typical WebCenter Sites Deployment Topology
Furthermore, WebCenter Sites communicates asset dependency information to all Sites and Satellite Server nodes. So when individual assets on a page change, each cluster node (in a Sites or Satellite Server cluster) is able to determine where that asset is used and which page fragments should be invalidated. Caching is therefore not limited to only page level. WebCenter Sites caching includes multiple layers of different kinds of cache, each tooled for a specific delivery scenario: assets, page fragments, and even database queries.
Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) can be used with WebCenter Sites to further increase performance. WebCenter Sites complements CDNs by caching authenticated content not typically cachable by CDNs. In addition, WebCenter Sites Satellites are an added availability layer that can provide a back up to the CDN as well as act as an additional barrier for intrusion attacks. For companies with moderate traffic, WebCenter Sites provides a cost effective solution for caching in lieu of using a CDN.
To summarize, granular caching at a fragment-level ensures a high performing website with reduced cost and hardware footprint. To meet and anticipate performance needs, such a caching strategy should considered when implementing a website.
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On Demand Webcast: How Brands Can Survive Digital Darwinism
This is the age of Digital Darwinism – where society and technology evolve faster than your ability to adapt. How well poised is your brand to survive and thrive in this new environment? Watch this webcast to hear Altimeter Group digital analyst and futurist, Brian Solis, discuss the rise of connected consumerism and learn how brands can survive Digital Darwinism by better understanding customer expectations, disruptive technology, and the new opportunities that arise from them.
Exa Strength Web Performance
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Today's guest post is from Kelly Goetsch. Kelly is a Senior Product Manager for Oracle's vertically-integrated hardware and software stack, Exalogic. Kelly came to Oracle through the ATG acquisition, where he spent over six years as a Senior Architect with ATG's Professional Services organization. He spent his last three years at ATG with Walmart Global eCommerce, serving as their chief ATG consultant. Kelly has published numerous white papers on topics including Exalogic, distributed computing, large-scale eCommerce deployment architectures, performance tuning, and maximum availability. He holds a M.S. in M.I.S. and a B.S. in Entrepreneurship from the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Over the past decade, online customer experience has evolved from requiring a single application supporting a single channel to an ecosystem of related applications, middleware, and core technology supporting an increasingly converged set of all physical and virtual channels. For some Oracle customers, the web is the sole channel. For those that have a physical presence, many trips to a store now begin with online research. Even most post-sales service is being moved online. Here's how customers are beginning to interact with their brands:
The Increasingly Complex Customer Journey
Customers are no longer satisfied dealing with siloed organizations. Customers want a seamless interaction across all channels. As a result of these changes, many purchases today, even those that take place in-store, are driven by the online channel. In fact, a 2011 study showed that 48% of all retail sales are either online purchases or web-influenced purchases.
Oracle technology can power the entire online customer experience ecosystem, from marketing driven sites to eCommerce sites and self-service portals. Oracle WebCenter Sites often plays a key role in delivering the online customer experience due to its exceptional ability to deliver content effectively to different customers on different devices.
As a result of these additional touch points and the increasing traffic on each channel, the traffic that WebCenter Sites needs to support has grown exponentially while customers are increasingly expecting that pages load instantaneously.
Oracle WebCenter Sites on Exalogic Benchmarking Results
So what's the solution? Oracle's engineered systems – Oracle Exalogic and Oracle Exadata – are supercharged platforms comprised of hardware and software that are designed for these ever-increasing workloads. Oracle Exalogic runs the app and middle tiers whereas Oracle Exadata runs the database tier. Oracle's engineered systems contain all of the storage, x86-based compute power, networking equipment, virtualization, management software, and unique optimizations for Oracle WebCenter Sites to ensure that Oracle WebCenter Sites runs exceptionally well. Since Oracle owns all layers of the stack, from storage to networking to Oracle WebCenter Sites, Oracle has been able to vertically optimize the entire hardware and software stack to work better together. As a result of all this engineering, uncached pages are delivered 11.6x faster on Oracle Exalogic and Oracle Exadata when compared to an equivalent commodity-based system. Publishing is 3.7x faster. Cached pages are served 2.2x more efficiently per core. It's these numbers, along with all of the other benefits of running engineered systems that has our customers adopting these systems in droves.
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White Paper: Exalogic and Exadata - The Optimal Platform for Oracle WebCenter Sites
Exalogic and Exadata should be considered whenever a new Oracle WebCenter Sites environment is built that requires the utmost in performance and scalability, whether for a new implementation, a hardware refresh, or an upgrade of Oracle WebCenter Sites. Exalogic and Exadata bring increased topline revenue, reduced total cost of ownership, and faster time-to-market, all of which act together to provide the best return on investment and make Exalogic and Exadata the best platform on which to deploy Oracle WebCenter Sites. To learn more about Oracle WebCenter Sites on Oracle Exalogic and Oracle Exadata, download this white paper.
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The High Consequences of Poorly Performing Websites
I recently returned from a wonderful trip to the Dominican Republic for a destination wedding where the skies were sunny, the temps were in the eighties, and the hotel internet connection was slow and unreliable. From the point of view of those traveling with me, the lousy connection was probably a good thing -- it prevented me from checking in on work emails frequently and worrying too much about what was going on back in the office. At the same time, however, it did leave me frustrated over the few online tasks I’d wanted to accomplish while away that had to be delayed until I returned to the U.S. where greater bandwidth and reliability awaited.
Offline in Playa del Macao, Dominican Republic.
This experience got me thinking about not only how much we’ve come to rely on the online channel in our everyday lives, but also how important high performance is when it comes to the online customer experience. After all, the slow page load times and time-outs I experienced at the resort were enough to make me drop my entire online agenda while on vacation.
The simple matter is that it’s not enough to make your web presence available and hope for the best. All site visitors are naturally impatient and rightly so. As a result, you need to make sure that your web presence is finely tuned and super fast and super responsive. Even small dips in performance can have high consequences for your business and consumers expect web pages to load at increasingly faster speeds. For example:
- Shopzilla decreased their average page load time from 6 second to 1.2 seconds resulting in a 25% page view increase and 12% revenue increase1
- A 1-second delay in page-load time can result in 11% fewer page views, a 16% decrease in customer satisfaction, and 7% loss in conversions2
- Amazon discovered that 1 ms of latency would cost them 1% in sales3
- Google found that an extra ½ second in time for a search page to load resulted in a 20% drop in traffic3
- Tablet users expect websites to load in under three seconds; smart phone users expect pages to load in less than four seconds4
Many of you may be familiar with these statistics already, but it’s important to note that high online performance is not only the concern of online behemoths like Google and Amazon. It should be your concern too. That’s why we’ll spend this week on the WebCenter blog taking a closer look at how to deliver high performance websites.
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Are you an existing Oracle WebCenter Sites customer?
Find documentation, downloads, video tutorials, forums and more on Oracle’s web experience management solution. Just visit Oracle WebCenter Sites on the Oracle Technology Network.
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