Afterword

“The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.” – Dorothy Parker

This book is the result of a long and arduous process on the part of your authors and hopefully a not-quite-as-painful learning experience for you, Gentle Reader.

From febrile anticipation to use case design, through exhaustive testing and retesting to (we hope) inspired writing, this book has been an exercise in curiosity. We asked ourselves: what will the OneStream Planning Practitioner care about, what is obvious and simple but not widely used, what is almost universal practice but really ought not to be, what missed opportunities are there because techniques are too hard or too obscure? We then tried to formulate the topics that addressed those questions, cogently write about them, and – with luck – imparted some of our knowledge to you.

This describes what we did, but not why. The OneStream product is a platform with few limits. Its open nature permits innovative and powerful solutions to Planning problems but equally exposes the Practitioner to poor design and implementation. We feel – we know – that the surest way to avoid a bad application is to understand why a feature or a function or a Method or a Component does what it does, and only then know how to best use it.

Our philosophy during the writing of this book was, and is, to inculcate that same level of curiosity and excitement around the discovery process. “How do I do it?” addresses only an immediate need and does not and cannot anticipate or address solving the next problem. “Why does it work that way?” answers not only that pressing question, but also provides the foundational knowledge for independent discovery and problem resolution.

Curiosity as methodology is hard work; it is the only way to understand and master a product as vast and as powerful as OneStream. We hope you join us in this spirit of curiosity so that we may all design, implement, and own the very best OneStream applications.