It only seemed like yesterday I wrote my last blog article, in-fact it was 11th January 2021!, I have been so busy with de Novo (#wearedenovo) and my obligations to the wonderful ERP Today, that I have just not had time to write. However, after a great night out with the #Certusalumni – the original pioneers of Oracle SaaS Cloud – Ian Carline, Richard Atkins and Rob English along with an alcohol induced headache and watching todays announcement from Oracle regarding Oracle Me, I was inspired to metaphorically put pen to paper and write…

Change the Conversation

‘Change the conversation’ a phrase that I have heard and used many times myself. When pioneering, searching for new ideas, seeking out new markets and looking for the next opportunity or market trend, you can easily get dragged back into what is the status quo and existing market behaviours.

The ability to find inspiration can come from the most unlikely of sources, something you remember from years ago, something you read, something you discuss with friends over a bottle of wine in a restaurant (thank heavens we can do the most normal of normal things again), something on a side of a bus?

Studying market behaviour in the technology industry I personally find fascinating. A market of many stakeholders – buyers and sellers from platform vendors, system integrators, ISV’s and of course customers to name just a few. Behind all of this you cannot ignore the VC’s, Private Equity and the Business Angels, providing the much-needed risk capital to fuel innovation.

Understanding and seeing what resonates, whilst also watching the latest trend as it comes and goes, and most importantly identifying the cyclical pattern which many do not even consider let alone embrace to their advantage is fundamental in determining a winning proposition.

Evolution of the Experience Economy – Its Happening in front of Us!

I have now been writing, let alone investing money and time (the most valuable of assets) in the #experienceeconomy for over two years now. Slowly but surely, through the delivery of new technology capability and the focus on deep personalisation within industry vertical solutions, the playing field we know as the enterprise, or more specifically enterprise resource planning (ERP) is changing.

Being an systems implementer with industry domain experience, references, people with vendor certifications and an ability to compete effectively on price (don’t get me started on that!) has been ‘table stakes’ for years. Somewhere along the line SaaS became a commodity play and everyone forgot about value creation.

Regardless, the industry has moved on, and whilst significant amounts of buyer education still needs to be undertaken, the move to delivering industry vertical solutions by personalised experiences over standardised business processes is gaining more and more traction.

Salesforce has always been in the mix; ServiceNow fundamentally changed as a company and its positioning using its Now technology platform; as well as Microsoft becoming more and more vocal around industry solutions have unquestionably all been leading the way.

Finally, Oracle or ‘big red’ as I still refer to it, has awoken and firmly announced its direction of travel having to recognise the need to be more active in an ever changing game, and the need to respond effectively to the onslaught of experience platforms over the past two years from the competition.

The Importance of Oracle Me Announcement – Empowering the Client’s People

Crystal ball prediction time and I stress again that this is just my personal opinion.

What we have seen with Oracle’s public announcement today, is a whole lot more than more SaaS product innovation with Oracle Me. In a single word its ’empowerment!’.

Whilst it always takes time for Oracle to pivot, its resources are frankly unlimited and it has the ability to gain momentum quickly and accelerate pass the competition. Often this is when Oracle is at its most dangerous as a competitor.

We have seen this several times before, from the days of on-premise, to most recently in what was the first era of the Cloudwars with Workday which seemed miles ahead, only for Oracle eventually to power past as it delivered a single unified system in ERP, HCM, Payroll and SCM together, whilst adding Digital Assistant very early on. Anyone in the ERP ecosystem will tell you, the suite play always trumps best of breed in a back-office enterprise, and Oracle achieved this with aplomb and continues to do so to this day.

Oracle through Oracle ME is recognising the hybrid Cloud era and providing the tools for connectively, communication and collaboration that are required to deliver employee experiences that matter that go way beyond the transactional base of a SaaS Cloud ERP system. A place I will argue where Workday is still at, and SAP is still getting there – they seemed to miss the first Cloud era altogether. These Vendors however are no longer the competition.

Most importantly the Oracle ME tools buy-in to the low code, no code platform concept and empower the Client to take control of its configuration. Systems Integrators beware!

Today, with the announcement of Oracle ME, it is just as an important announcement as when Oracle firstly announced Fusion SaaS back in 2011!

Oracle is publicly signalling awareness, accepting the landscape is changing, and acknowledging to stay relevant it needs to evolve. This is how I interpret events today, and April 2022 is a time I would suggest that everyone will point back to in years to come.

In essence, Oracle has changed the conversation about their product offerings in one go. The #experienceeconomy isn’t about technology platforms, it’s about creating digital experiences that empowers individuals to undertake a task or action efficiently and effectively at any given moment in time, recognising that the majority of people do not work in functional silos. Oracle Me does that, the prediction being that Oracle repositions itself selling personalised industry solutions.

It will be interesting now to see if my prediction comes true, but if it does, as far as Oracle is concerned it started today. Game on…

#oracle #oraclecloud #saas #cloud #oraclehcmcloud #oracleerpcloud #experienceeconomy #digital #digitaltransformation #oracleme #wearedenovo

Disclaimer: This is a personal blog. The opinions expressed here represent my own and not those of my employer. In addition, my thoughts and opinions change from time to time and I consider this a necessary consequence of having an open mind. This blog is intended to provide a semi-permanent point in time and as such any thoughts or opinions expressed within out of date posts may not be the same or similar to those that I hold today.

Double trouble for this digital edition so I thought I would pull in some additional expertise and commentary again from Libby Mason, recognised organisation and change management expert. So, here’s another episode from the Mark and Libby show…

Over the last 18 months we have seen the constant rise in the industry narrative from the SaaS cloud platform providers regarding the importance of delivering ‘experiences that matter’. Historically this narrative was heavily focussed on the end customer, but with a tectonic shift in how we manage our work and our workforce there is a wave of experience platforms which are now focussed on the employee as the customer.

SaaS ERP cloud over the past decade has delivered capability through leading business processes; whilst this is no longer new, it provides the foundation of any enterprise change as this becomes the base for future innovation. We have seen in the last few months that even the likes of Oracle, which is clearly one, if not the market leader of ERP and HCM SaaS cloud technology reacting to the relentless onslaught from the likes of Salesforce and ServiceNow with its ‘Oracle journeys’ in regard to the experience economy.

The gathering momentum around delivering relevant, timely and easy to access experiences to employees is fast becoming an element in any company’s competitive advantage. This is becoming the new benchmark in the digital world. Organisations in both public and private sectors are now making the link between improved employee and business performance, enabled by SaaS cloud platforms, delivering better services to their end customer by enabling their own workforce to do their jobs effectively. 

Future blueprint – building value through great experiences 

Whilst everyone seems naturally to dive immediately into ‘digital journey mapping’, which is a necessary activity and usually accommodated by a nice set of PowerPoint slides, let’s step back and address the basics.

Start with the end 

A lot of organisations fall into the trap of buying shiny new tools and then going to find problems to fix with them without really understanding which challenges are the most important to solve or which opportunities to prioritise. Cloud is a journey; you’re not going to get there all at once, so start with the experiences that are most important to building value and momentum for your organisation and determine which parts of those experiences are critical to quality. It will be different for every organisation and will span every process area from recruitment and onboarding, to procurement, to invoicing. Consider what you need to get right to succeed.

Cloud is a journey; you’re not going to get there all at once

Get your business model right 

Even when technology is deployed in the right way, if the operating model isn’t right, and the right employees are neither empowered nor have the right skills to do their jobs, then organisations can’t succeed. The people and organisational side of the equation is and always will be just as important. Experience platforms depend on having the right people doing the work, in the right place in the organisation, with the right skills and behaviours – getting this aligned up-front means we need to consider how to adapt our business to work in a new way. It will mean new roles, new skills, new behaviours and a new business logic to drive enhanced workflows.

The cloud SaaS design principle of ‘adopt, not adapt’ has not gone away. You need to decide up-front which technology platform’s processes you wish to ‘adopt’ as they all work differently – a ‘vendor agnostic’ strategy when designing the operating model only leads to significant rework. It’s like putting the cart before the horse, so don’t sit on the fence, as technology platform choice is not something you should kick down the road.

This is not an easy transition to make for many organisations. Trusting and empowering employees at the right levels in organisations is the best way to reduce unnecessary hand offs and eliminate waste in processes. This means challenging traditional approaches to managing control and often means reshaping individual and whole teams’ roles and accountabilities.  

Understanding organisational maturity will help to prioritise investment in upskilling and improving in areas where the experiences will have the greatest impact. 

Understand the data and get it right 

The data architecture of an organisation is absolutely critical. How many times do we come across poor quality data being held in siloed applications? For experience platforms to deliver genuine value, organisations need to spend more time thinking about the data model (including the end-to-end business logic like workflows, approvals). 

At a minimum, deploying an ERP SaaS cloud system becomes the first step in capturing and maintaining standardised datasets through the execution of standardised business processes. Elements to consider: 

For employees to be effective in the moment, they need the right data at their fingertips enabling informed decision making. 

Who is leading the way?

Done correctly, successful organisations: focus on business outcomes; break down delivery silos; create positive employee experiences without frustration and perceived bureaucracy; and consider human behaviours alongside technology fit. Examples include: 

Lloyds Bank deployed ServiceNow to address the problem of managing complex IT infrastructure across 100,000 people where data fragmentation across such organisations is commonplace in the financial services industry. Lloyds now has a cohesive view of its critical business processes. This has led not only to significant improvements in control, cost reduction and regulatory compliance but more importantly it has empowered employees, reducing frustration in the process! It also now has an experience platform for building continuous improvement across all areas of the business beyond the back-office enterprise.

Unilever is another example of an organisation which is leading the way in unifying the employee experience across its ERP/HCM cloud estate. Salesforce is deployed as the seamless engagement layer over their estate to simplify employee interaction, whilst still taking advantage of SaaS standardised business processes. This strategy has significantly improved employee productivity and reduced the reliance on employee helpdesks.

Eye on the prize

Experience platforms offer the potential to unlock significant value, enabling organisations to deliver performance enhancing services to their employees. This prize can only be achieved when you understand what is important to your organisation; know the cloud SaaS technology you are going to deploy and put in place an operating model and the data you need to support achieving that ambition. Without it, you will be left wondering why you’re not getting the value and what is wrong with the technology……spoiler alert, it’s not the technology!    

Trusting and empowering employees at the right levels in organisations is the best way to reduce unnecessary hand offs and eliminate waste in processes

Mark Sweeny, founder and chief executive, de Novo Solutions 
Libby Mason, founder, Alluvion Consulting