The Digital Economy is about much more than e-commerce and other business technologies of the past two decades. Quest met with Lyle Ekdahl to explore the latest thinking about the Digital Economy and to discuss how Digital Transformation helps businesses to take advantage of changing business opportunities.

This post is part two of three about digital transformation. See parts one and two.

JD Edwards is known as the platform for mission-critical workloads. What investments is JD Edwards making in transformative solutions that extend this platform?

We have a dual focus. First, we are making a huge investment in creating options to extend, personalize, coexist, and integrate with other applications in powerful, modern ways that involve low or no code. This affects the use, user experience, and interoperations of JD Edwards. We are also investing to make sure we can support agile business solutions, for example with hybrid cloud deployments.

There is a paradox at play. ERP systems provide best-practice standardization as the enterprise system of record. Simultaneously, the vast majority of customers use JD Edwards as a system that enables business differentiation. Therefore, we will continue to support customer needs for both standardization and differentiation. With JD Edward, one size need not fit all.

Consumer and workforce expectations towards their software applications are changing. The Millennial workforce is reluctant to accept the legacy user experience. What is JD Edwards doing to meet the changing workforce expectations?

For us, it is all about moving beyond the cubicle and beyond the traditional power user. Digital business does not look like rows of users in cubicles with yellow sticky notes beside their screens as they spend much of their day sending emails.

Digital business includes casual users, users who are not in a cubicle, and machines. What users need and what JD Edwards is providing is a light-touch interaction paradigm at relevant points in business processes. Users get access to contextually needed capabilities at each point in a process, such as data capture, acceptance of a condition, or reporting on a condition. That is what users expect and get from the native applications their mobile devices, and that is what JD Edwards is delivering.

Can you tell us more about your vision for everything from backend to “glass”?

Simplify, simplify, simplify…but retain the embedded power of JD Edwards’ more than 40 years of intellectual capital. JD Edwards delivers more functionality in our areas of focus than any competitor. However, all that capability can be daunting for the new or casual user. Providing new kinds of automation from implementation to operations will result in a new user experience for the enterprise. We call it JD Edwards UX One. We are getting ready to deliver role-based solutions with powerful landing pages, guided task-oriented process pages, and Citizen Developer extensibility.

Our process design model is Alert, Analyze, and Act. No longer will casual users have to poke around menu choices trying to figure out what is needed and how to do it. Instead, your JD Edwards system will alert you with action priorities and then guide you through the steps to get things done.

UX One enhances our strategy of exposing more and more of JD Edwards capability through easy to use “on the glass” solutions. All types of JD Edwards users can work the way they want, personalize their workspace, and be more efficient. Efficiency derives from the ability to access JD Edwards on different devices, in different situations, and at different levels of detail.

Looking back at the past year, what are the biggest accomplishments of your development organization? What are the most surprising results of these accomplishments for customers?

Release 9.2 was a huge accomplishment for us, and there have been subsequent enhancements. We launched new industry functionality such as Outbound Inventory Management and Advanced Job Forecasting for engineering, construction, and professional services. We also provide a path to the Cloud for our customers.

We have continued our internal progression toward transformational innovation, agile product development, and continuous delivery, supported by internal automation that is starting to deliver even greater product quality. In addition, self-organizing teams get time each quarter to explore innovation opportunities and turn those ideas into JD Edwards product enhancements.

We are continuing our rapid release of new and useful content for customers and partners at www.learnjde.com.

Finally, we have a great partner network that is enhancing our customers’ business.

What is next for JD Edwards?

We are working on our own internal digital transformation. Moreover, we will continue to empower our customers with the JD Edwards product capabilities they need to disrupt their markets and stay ahead of the competition. Digital transformation is about helping customers to innovate and differentiate quickly and with no internal disruption of ongoing operations. JD Edwards is delivering innovations from backend to glass. Customers will see an ongoing series of planned enhancements to optimize their cloud and user experience.

Learn More

• Conference Presentations & Recordings (Conference presentations and recordings are paid member benefits – contact engagement@questdirect.org for more information)
  • Advanced Job Forecasting – Accurate and Auditable
  • Upgrade to 9.2 Application Release Tips, Tricks and Troubleshooting
  • JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Upgrade Panel
• Read this Quest blog: JD Edwards Announces UX One and Additional Enhancements  

For even more information about JD Edwards and how to take advantage of JD Edwards updates and functionalities, come to our Oracle COLLABORATE conference, COLLABORATE 18.