I've just returned from a roadtrip with my daughter to look at one of the colleges she's been accepted to attend next fall. Yes - with limited time to make a decision, we're attempting to hit as many of the admitted student open houses that we can to aid the decision process. As an admitted student, these trips take on a very different feel than our pre-application college roadtrips. Now, she needs to "try on" each school and see if the vibe of the campus fits her well. At this exciting time in her life, it was great to get out and spend some time with her on the open road on our 5hr+ drive to upstate NY. 

As we were driving, we were also conducting an experiment with our newly updated dashboard NAV/GPS in our Prius against our other older TomTom GPS. We programmed both for the exact same address and hit the GO - take us there button on each screen. Here's where the fun began. Our built in dashboard NAV (running off of a brand new latest version DVD) told us the drive would take 7+ hrs while our TomTom NAV reported closer to 5 hrs in a New Zealand accent. You can imagine, of course,  which one we were going to follow. Now - anyone familiar with the Boston area and NY knows that its pretty easy to just take the Mass Pike (90) to the NY ThruWay (90) and then hit all the windy country roads to reach any number of small liberal arts colleges nestled in beautiful little college towns. All along the route - our dashboard NAV would be directing us off of 90 to some other minor road or highway which we'd ignore - it became a guessing game as we'd skip the directed exit and watch the NAV recalculate the route and time to arrival. They still wouldn't match in ETA by very significant differences of hours.  We stopped and checked at one point to make sure that we really had entered the identical addresses into both devices. Same address - check.  We were amused and privately, I was formulating the complaint letter to Toyota in my head about the horrible product I had just upgraded (for a ridiculous price) from 2010 to the latest 2012 map data.

RECALCULATING

We stopped for a break with about 2 hrs left in our journey and stretched our legs. With the car now in PARK, we found another hidden setup menu of controls that was disabled as a safety feature while the car was in motion. Buried deep in a menu dungeon, we found our answer. As the default setting, a checkbox saying "AVOID TOLL ROADS" was checked. Everything made sense now for why the NAV was always trying to get us off of 90 (a toll-intensive highway) and onto alternative slower (but toll free) roads. As soon as we unchecked that box - VOILA! our ETA's for both NAVs were now aligned providing a discordant harmony between the New Zealand accent and the generic woman's voice - the only voice available on the dashboard NAV for every upcoming turn. The TomTom was turned off and put away. One small setting with huge ramifications for our journey. Our experience on the small backroads, while taking many hours more might also have been an interesting ride. The routes both ended up at the same place - each just took us on a different journey - a different experience with different points of reference along the way. Little did I know at the time, the powerful metaphor for the college experience was building around our journey and would also provide me a great intro for today's blog as well. 

The next morning, we were sitting in multiple sessions while the university admissions, faculty, students and special alumni guests spoke to us passionately about why our children should choose to matriculate at their school. Each spoke about the value of the journey our children were about to embark upon and how their programs would be the best fertile soil to aid the development of an already exceptional student into something even better. Creating the best environment to foster innovation across multiple disciplines was core to their pitch. They combined classes with Philosophy and Biology, History and Physics, Ancient Greece and Political Science, all the while causing students to step outside their comfort zones and approach topics from a completely different perspective. Taking risks, intellectually, was central to breaking age old patterns of traditional thinking. The administration would tend the soil, watch after the seedlings and produce a new crop of young adults with the ability to think critically, be nimble in new environments and experienced in approaching interdisciplinary challenges from new perspectives to find innovative solutions while working with others from a variety of backgrounds across the globe.

After numerous sessions throughout the day, I was firmly convinced that I wanted to go back to college and attend this school, but someone has to keep working to pay for it, so we finally hit the road to head home. Along the way, through small towns full of old silos and sagging barns - I couldn't help but wonder how many of these people were able to survive. There was no obvious industry or employment. My daughter and I talked about how people really needed to be resourceful and play with the hand you've been dealt the best you can to survive. It was at this point that we passed the sign for the "Petrified Creatures" Museum and we understood that innovation comes in all shapes and sizes across the world, often driven by looking at what you have in front of you and who you can pull together as a team to work together. Summed up by the fortune (above) from the fortune cookie I got with our less than stellar chinese takeout along the route home (I know.. what were we expecting...? ).

So... what does this have to do with Oracle WebCenter? Many of the Oracle Fusion Middleware Innovation Winners in the Oracle WebCenter category last year have shown that same spirit of tackling a problem from a different perspective for positive results. One of my favorites is the LOUI project. They were featured in an article in Oracle's Profit magazine in Feb. 2013 and are shown here below in a video talking about their project that brought together healthcare workers and technology innovators to solve a public healthcare challenge in Kentucky.

At Oracle Openworld 2012 the University of Louisville won the prestigious Oracle Excellence Awards for Fusion Middleware Innovation in the Oracle WebCenter category for their implementation of the LOUI (Louisville Informatics Institute) Initiative, a Statewide Informatics Network, which will improve public healthcare and lower cost through the use of novel technology and next generation analytics, decision support and innovative outcomes-based payment systems.