Oracle Mobile & Business Intelligence
It's been sometime since I've had a chance to post a blog. I have been truly heads down full-time doing the product strategy/management for a new Oracle Fusion wide product and still doing my other full-time job of Product Strategy for Fusion HCM Analytics. The good news is that the product will be released soon, got a couple of new mobile/analytics patents and I am lucky enough to get to deliver the Oracle's first "official" conference presentation on it at Collaborate in April -
Session: #10475 - Oracle Fusion Tap – Mobile Solutions for the Anywhere, Anytime Worker
Description:
Oracle Fusion Tap is a collection of mobility application modules that work across the Oracle Fusion Applications Suite to provide mobile workers the ability to be productive anywhere and anytime. Hear about Oracle’s strategy for mobility in Oracle Fusion Applications and learn how this information-driven approach to mobility enables mobile workers to know what they need do, what they need to know, and whom they need to connect with to get the job done.
It's been a very exciting and creative project.
But this blog isn't solely about what I've been up to. I also wanted to share a couple of Oracle videos on Oracle Mobile and Oracle HCM BI. Enjoy
Workforce Predictions – Nice Mention by Josh Bersin
The second elephant now in this market is Oracle. With thousands of customers running various versions of Peoplesoft and Oracle e-Business Suite, Oracle knows that the Fusion HCM has a big opportunity. I had the opportunity to attend a strategic briefing with Oracle and customers and Fusion HCM is finally here.
Just so you have a little background, Fusion started in 2004 as a middleware engineering effort to help Oracle integrate its wide variety of application products (PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, Siebel, Oracle, ..) into a next generation applications platform. The middleware architecture includes a variety of services (data services, authentication, identity management, security, content management, data intelligence, etc.) which enable the Fusion HCM applications to interoperate with any PeopleSoft or Oracle system. What this means is that you do not have to replace your existing PeopleSoft or Oracle applications to use Fusion HCM.
I talked with Principal Financial Group who is an early customer (existing PeopleSoft customer) and they are using Fusion HCM's compensation module alongside their existing PeopleSoft system.
Fusion HCM has some best-of-breed capabilities. One key feature is what Oracle calls the "Workforce Predictions" module, which computes the risk attributes of employees based on tenure, performance, role, compa ratio, etc. Oracle worked with Saratoga and other HR data experts to build this module - and it will grow in power as more people use the system.
While Oracle's products are not always the easiest to use, Fusion HCM is now a complete product and can be adopted without a massive replacement of existing HRMS investments. This will make Oracle's offering more compelling than ever and the company has made a major investment in sales and marketing to help drive this message forward.
Full article is her...http://joshbersin.com/2011/10/10/elephants-of-hr-software-enter-the-talent-management-market/
Identifying the “Innovators”
Today if your hear the name Apple, Tata Motors, 5 Guys or Pixar your first thought is “I just don’t like what they do. I Love what they do.” You; laughed during Cars, were awe inspired by the iPod. drove 15 miles to get that burger, and were fascinated by a profitable $2000 mass-produce car. You also didn’t just experience them once… Cars 2, iPad, second third fourth burger, Range Rover. They have brought and defined Innovation for our generation and possible the next several.
Does this mean you have to be innovative to be like Apple or 5 Guys or to compete against them? Absolutely. Just ask Palm, GM, In n Out Burgers or Disney Studios. In fact, based on a survey from the Conference Board, innovation is the #4 priority for CEOs in 2011. Innovation impacts your business in more ways than you can possibly imagine. Bill Gates once said “Microsoft’s top 10% is impactful, but if I lose my 20 most innovative software engineers Microsoft will go out of business within 12 months.”
You can’t quantify innovation by looking at a person or giving them a test. Innovation sometimes only happens when the right-mix of people get together in a team setting. So how do you identify your “innovators”? Does your company have enough of them? Does the innovation increase profitability?
You can determine who the innovators are by determining the following;
- How much does a person or team produce? - Does this team or person deliver on what ever they are given or is it hit and miss?
- Did they produce a new thing? – Is it a completely never before seen product, drug or process? Was it the next generation of something? Was it something that was a copy of another product?
- What impact did it have on the market? – Did what they produce change the market place? Did it displace a competitor? Did it define a new category of products? Did it make the company better? Do analysts, customers or the press say what was produced was innovative?
- What was the profit contribution? – How much profit did it bring the company? Did it raise the stock price? Innovation is important to success. But it shouldn’t cost so much that you never recoup the costs.
- Do they repeat? – Anybody can get lucky once. But delivering innovative things 2, 3 or 4 times in a timely manner means the producers are Innovators.
With this you can then identify and put policies in place to further foster your innovators or have a business case to hire them.
A lack of innovators within a company may not bankrupt it. But as we have seen time and time again a company with the right amount of innovators will make more profit, have a more engaged workforce and take the customers of those that don't.
Future of HCM Analytics – Workforce Predictions (with poll)
I gave a webinar on hr.com this week discussing the Future of HCM Analytics...with a bit of Oracle Fusion HCM Workforce Prediction demo (slides here). I was excited about this webinar, because, I got to talk about future state topics, showed a demo, tried out some new material and was the most excited about being able to give an online poll. The poll's questions focused in on what companies were spending on HCM Analytics.
Webinar polls are usually notoriously hard to do. You are not in a room with the attendees. This means you can't easily guilt or bribe attendees into giving answers to your polls. Plus the minor fact that everybody is on mute!!! So they can't verbally respond even if they wanted to. However with GoToMeeting by Citrix (very impressed with their "Poll" feature) and a few electronic Starbucks cards I was able to achieve a 75% response rate for the 350 attendees.
Poll Question #1: Does your company have 1 or more workers dedicated to HCM Analytics?
- Yes: 49% Respondents have 1 or more workers dedicated to HCM Analytics.
- No: 51% Respondents have less than 1 worker dedicated to HCM Analytics.
Poll Question #2: Does your company spend more than 1% of its Business Intelligence budget on HCM Analytics?
- Yes: 1% of respondents say their company spends more than 1% of the BI budget on HCM Analytics.
- No: 38% of respondents say their company spends less than 1% of the BI budget on HCM Analytics.
- Don't Know: 51% of respondents say they do not how much their company spends on HCM Analytics.
The numbers are certainly a bit bleak for Human Resources in terms of the % of Analytics budget it actually gets. But I wasn't surprised. I see adoption numbers of HCM Analytics all the time and this is very much aligned with those. However the main take away from this should not be on the lack of budget or people to support Human Resource Analytics initiatives. The take away should be that a company's leadership does not get what it needs from Human Resources with their traditional HCM Analytics offerings. Leaders spend money on what it needs and what has a Return on Investment. Traditional HCM Analytics simply does not provide an ROI. The future of HCM Analytics is Workforce Prediction and it's already proven to have an ROI.
Workforce Planning – Overcoming the Barrier to Adoption
I am dating myself here, but for the past 18 years I have been a user, builder, practitioner, consultant and teacher of Workforce Planning. Over these almost 2 decades I have learned that the primary barrier to adoption has been that Human Resources attempts to replace an already existing, core and engrained Workforce Planning solution with their own. It’s not that Human Resources does this intentionally or think they can offer a better solution and overlooks the current one. They just do not have deep enough domain in the various Lines of Business to recognize that there are supporting structures and processes in place that the Lines of Business use to plan work for their employees. Examples of these already existing Workforce Planning processes are:
- Sales has territory management, territory optimization, etc.
- Engineering has several processes to choose from such as Waterfall, Agile, etc.
- Manufacturing, just like Engineering, also has a few to choose from like “Just In Time” Manufacturing.
- Call Centers have commonly adopted Workforce Optimization as their solution.
- Corporations can also adopt companywide processes, such as Six Sigma or Total Quality Management.
Overcoming the Adoption Barrier
It’s natural that the Lines of Business would and will continue to reject HR’s own solution to Workforce Planning. They will never believe nor could Human Resources show that they have a greater domain than they do in their own business. However they do need HR’s help to make it dramatically more effective than it is today. So how does HR overcome this barrier?
- Understand HR’s Role: Human Resources should absolutely play a role in Workforce Planning. But that role should not be the lead role. The Lines of Business know their business best, is already doing workforce planning and Human Resources should work with them to determine how they can support an already existing process. Not telling them how to do Workforce Planning for their business.
- New Solutions not Needed: There are lots of Workforce Planning vendors, consultants and methodology out there. The first place to look for providing your Lines of Businesses with a solution for Workforce Planning is not here. For the most part, the Lines of Businesses already have some solution they are using and need to figure out how to embed already existing Human Resources solutions into their processes. For example, yearly Performance reviews do not work effectively for customer facing Professional Services teams. Performance Reviews should be done either at the end of every engagement or for extremely long engagement, at the end of every milestone. Either way, Professional Service teams want to fit in Performance Reviews in order to determine who should role onto the next project and who should get some additional training.
If Human Resources follow the above, not lead and not replace, they will be able to successfully partner with the business and will have a much easier time getting subsequent initiatives adopted. Best of luck….
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