OdeCloud Community Becomes “New Normal” for NetSuite Consultants
With COVID-19 still a lingering threat around the globe, many have wondered whether practices such as working from home were to become part of society’s “new normal.”
For IT ventures such as us at OdeCloud, we recognized early that forcing NetSuite consultants to commute to a designated office space was both incredibly counterproductive and generally counterintuitive to their type of work — most of which, in truth, can be done from the comfort of their respective homes.
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However, we had had one primary concern: Will a career-based community built strictly online allow for consultants to feel the same level of growth, camaraderie and knowledge-transfer as they do in an office space surrounded by their peers?
Speaking to OdeCloud community member and expert NetSuite consultant Jacky Wong, he says that the OdeCloud community is an excellent avenue for him to share his accounting knowledge, as well as the perfect opportunity to learn more from NetSuite developers.
“I know some of the people in OdeCloud are a little bit more technical-driven C-Suite script developers, and for me — with an accounting background, with the knowledge that I know about accounting teams — I’m more towards the functional side,” Jacky said.
So it’s a little bit easier for me to explain to certain people on the functional terms, the accounting terms; and I’m able to start the same on the developers’ side and bridge that gap….”
While there will always be a place for brick and mortar, the fact of the matter is the world was largely able to adapt to the “WFH” lifestyle after the coronavirus outbreak, leaving some businesses with the question of whether it was worth paying for significant office space and associated amenities.
While Jacky states that working from home full time hasn’t been too bad, he says the lack of face-to-face interactions has taken some getting used to — but that’s exactly why he sees a need for OdeCloud’s online community.
“In the old days — well, it’s funny: this is last year, actually — you could actually go to the desk next to you to say hi to your coworker and say, ‘Hey, I got questions,’” Jacky said. “Instead now, you either talk in Slack, emails or phone calls.
“But it’s nothing like those immediate interactions with your coworkers, your watercolor chat, coffee break — those kinds of things — to just get that little idea going on and say, ‘Hey, with the gap you just talked about: I might have the solution in NetSuite — or, OdeCloud might have the solution there, too.’”
Talking more, I realized that Jacky and I have more in common than I first realized. Other than us both being Bay Area natives from Asian descent, we both have a deep love for sports, and he very much misses the opportunity to talk 49ers with his colleagues.
While there’s currently not much discussion going on about sports in the OdeCloud community, he knows that he can always count on OdeCloud to have his back when it comes to anything related to NetSuite.
“What makes OdeCloud strong, though, is definitely — if you look at the roster now — the diversity that we have, the knowledge that we have, the location that we have. It’s getting bigger. So that’s why it makes a lot of sense to be in this platform nowadays.”
