The HEUG year is off to a flying start! Earlier this month I headed across the pond to meet with my HEUG Exec team – the officers of the Board – to discuss our priorities for the year ahead and organise our workstreams. Despite having somewhat of a reputation for embracing change I’ve chosen to keep the same team in place for a second year – individually they each excel in their HEUG roles but as a team they outperform all expectations!
Our Board members have also been busy since Alliance. We are building on the strategic partnerships announced at Alliance – with PSUG and with Tambellini Group – we’d love to hear from those of you who have taken advantage of the special rates for HEUG members and how Tambellini’s research and advice has helped your institution.
A small team has also been looking at how we can support our cloud applications members – observing those members self-organise to share best practice and advocate to Oracle is like watching a remake of the beginnings of the HEUG. Higher Ed is indeed a special industry for collaborating in this way. Our Board is looking at the tools and services we provide to ensure we support this self-organised group to flourish!
The Alliance Workgroup, headed up by Michele Thibodeau, has been distilling the feedback from attendees at the ‘fishbowl’ sessions in Salt Lake City and also results from the quick survey carried out onsite by our wonderful volunteers. We’ll be discussing their recommendations on our call later this month and feeding these in to the Alliance ’19 planning process.
Speaking of Alliance ’19, the conference team will be on site at the Swan and Dolphin resort in Orlando later this week. I’m disappointed not to be joining them as they review the space, plan the schedule and layout for the opening and closing nights, think about new session formats, appraise the décor options and sample the food! The theme for the conference is coming together beautifully, once again leaving me in awe of the creativity, talent and passion of our team! I am personally thrilled to have the brilliant Alliance ’18 conference team of Cathy Thompson, Jason Koziara and Jane Barratta, back for a second year, joined by Cheri McEntee as the new Conference Assistant. Start thinking about your session proposals early because Alliance ’19 is not a conference you want to miss!
For those of you who can’t wait that long to network with the HEUG community and expand your knowledge and skills, there are plenty of opportunities on offer:
- our regional conferences, which gets underway with the NWHEUG conference starting today in Tacoma – I was lucky enough to attend the inaugural conference last year and loved seeing the interactions between attendees but was also very impressed with the quality of presentations. I am thinking of you all and wishing you another successful conference;
- the excellent Huron Webinar series (link) – an opportunity to learn best practice regarding cloud implementations from the experts! Even if you are not thinking about cloud applications yet I believe the advice can also be relevant to our on-premise applications – particularly when it comes to making configuration decisions to meet requirements and understanding the needs of our stakeholders. If we can apply that best practice now, perhaps our journey to the cloud will be easier to manage and more successful…?
Last but not least, being an international HEUG President from the EMEA region, it would be remiss of me not to round out this blog with a mention GDPR! It has been front and centre of so many discussions in our European institutions for a long time but its reach is not confined to Europe. You should note that we have enabled 2 items on the HEUG website related to GDPR and Privacy. The first is that upon visiting the site you are now greeted with a note that mentions we use cookies on the site. We are required by GDPR to notify users of this on a per browser basis. You will undoubtedly have seen this on a lot of sites recently. The second is we have had some updates to our privacy policy (which is linked in the footer of every page, and in the cookie statement).
Oracle have also been working to help our institutions manage our systems and data to comply with the new legislation. Please check out the following:
EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) - Considerations and Product Capabilities (Doc ID 2363912.1)
Campus Solutions 9.2 Data Privacy and Protection (Doc ID 2397232.1)
In light of Data Privacy initiatives worldwide, including the EU General Data Protection Regulation Act (GDPR), PeopleSoft HCM has delivered updates that will help customers address some of these regulations.
- Oracle has published an assessment of Personal and Sensitive Data as identified within PeopleSoft HCM, which is available through My Oracle Support (Doc ID 1).
- PeopleSoft has also provided additional data privacy capabilities by introducing an Applicant delete feature as well enhancing the existing Person Delete Process delivered in Image 25. HCM Update Image 25 on the PeopleSoft Video Channel.
- PeopleSoft posted on March 23, 2018 a PeopleSoft Release Patch (PRP) that allows for employee consent for capturing employee data and another PRP that allows organisations to mask specific Personally Identifiable Information (PII) stored in PeopleSoft. Bug ID 27619176 and Bug ID 27651377.
- An earlier published White Paper on Data Privacy explains how existing tools and technology help to secure your PeopleSoft applications. This document will be further updated to include more features, such as Data Archive Manager.
- More data privacy enhancements are on the roadmap which can be found on the PeopleSoft Planned Features and Enhancements on peoplesoftinfo.com or directly on My Oracle Support (Doc ID 1966243.2)