“Why do I need a dashboard? I’m a college department head, not a cab driver!” This is the common response that I receive every time I bring up the topic of the digital dashboard. However, I’m not talking about an automobile dashboard, of course, but a digital dashboard for Higher Education.

A digital dashboard is a Business Intelligence system designed along the lines of an automobile dashboard display system. However, digital dashboard is enhanced with sophisticated features that display real-time data in a more interactive and presentable way with color-coded visual effects – graphical representations of gauges and depictions that summarize institutional performance. While an automobile dashboard displays a speedometer, fuel gauge, temperature gauge, etc., the digital dashboard displays a Higher Education institution’s performance indicators with multiple gauges—in this case Key Performance Indicators, such as Retention Rate, Enrollment, Student Graduation Rate, Transfer Rate, etc. Much as a driver does with the automobile, college and university executives take appropriate actions based on alerts provided by the indicators.

In my next entry, I will share some thoughts on the digital dashboard as a Business Intelligence tool.

There are some things you can do to protect your applications investments. See Oracle’s presentation  for a complete listing. But, I can tell you that one thing stands out. You should upgrade to the minimum release required to allow direct migration to Fusion Applications.

This means that the following releases are recommended:

1. E-Business Suite 11i.10, R12 and beyond
2. PeopleSoft Enterprise 8.8, 8.9, 9.0 and beyond
3. JD Edwards EnterpriseOne 8.11, 8.12 and beyond
4. JD Edwards World A7.3, A8.1, A9.1 and beyond
5. Siebel 8.0 and beyond

Being on these releases will not only ensure that you are capable of upgrading to Fusion Applications in the future, but it will also enable you to take advantage of new products that are continuously being certified against these versions.

As I mentioned earlier, Oracle’s Applications Unlimited strategy complements the Fusion Applications. This means that you can conceivably stay on your current ERP platform without having to upgrade to Fusion Applications. Oracle categorizes three stages of lifetime support for Applications Unlimited. I will summarize the features and benefits of each, as described by Oracle on their site (http://www.oracle.com/support/lifetime-support-policy.html), and then explain why I do not recommend allowing your organization to remain at the third level of support.

1) Premier Support – provides you with maintenance and support of your Oracle Database, Oracle Fusion Middleware, and Oracle Applications for five years from their general availability date.

2) Extended Support – allows you stay competitive, with the freedom to upgrade on your own timetable. It provides you with an extra three years of support for specific Oracle releases for an additional fee. You benefit from the same quality of service you receive with Premier Support, with the security of knowing you can expand your systems when the time is right.

3) Sustaining Support – puts you in control of your upgrade strategy. With Sustaining Support, you will receive technical support for as long as you operate your systems – which includes access to Oracle’s online support tools, knowledgebases, pre-existing fixes for your solution, and assistance from technical experts.

My recommendation is not to remain in the Sustaining Support mode, because no new bugs will be accepted at this level. This negates your ability to be in control of your upgrade strategy based on business requirements, because, should a new issue arise, the standard advice will be to upgrade.

In my next entry, I will provide practical recommendations about what you should do about all of this now.

To facilitate the best of breed approach to Fusion Applications, Oracle consolidates the foundation components for each of the products in its portfolio (E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards and Siebel) in the suite’s technology stack.

Oracle has been doing this in a 2-step process. At one level, it is pulling more products under the Fusion Middleware umbrella. Fusion Middleware has expanded from a Web server to a rich suite of products including Application Server, Identity management, Security, Business Intelligence and Application Integration Architecture.

At the next level, Oracle has been upgrading the technology stack of the application products in the portfolio so that as many products from the Fusion Middleware suite can be utilized as possible.

For example, XML Publisher, the reporting framework from the Fusion Middleware Suite of products, has been certified to work with PeopleSoft 8.48 and is seamlessly integrated with version 9.0. This means when customers use PeopleSoft version 9.0, they are ready for Fusion Applications.

The same approach is used for several of the products in Fusion Middleware suite, such as Single Sign-on solutions, and Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (Formerly Siebel Analytics), which has been certified to work with E-Business suite.

The Fusion Applications will work on the same set of Fusion Middleware components. So you can protect your investment and reduce some upgrade-related headaches in the future by ensuring that your environment is running at least at the minimum level required to take advantage of the direct upgrade path to Fusion Applications.

In my next entry, I will discuss the available support options for Oracle Fusion.