By Michael Hickins - Originally posted on Forbes


Think about the talent contests that are so popular on TV these days. They’re entertaining, but they bear no resemblance to the way the world really works.

In those shows, individuals vie for the privilege of winning over an elite panel of experts. In the real world, organizations are vying for talent that’s all too scarce and growing scarcer. Why? Demographics are shifting; automation is eliminating most rote tasks, allowing people to do more of what they’re best at; and organizations are looking to expand globally while maintaining the same high standards they established at home.

Doing that requires technology that provides human resource and other managers with modern, holistic tools with which to manage their workforces. Thus, “the two most important applications inside of a modern enterprise are HCM and customer service, because it’s all about taking care of people—taking care of your employees who in turn take care of your customers,” said Larry Ellison, executive chairman of Oracle, during a keynote address at Oracle CloudWorld 2014.

Let’s face it: If you can’t compete for talent, you’re probably not going to be able to compete for much of anything at all.

Consider that 40% of the US workforce is going to retire in the next decade, and will be replaced by the kids of most of you reading this article. They’re going to expect the companies they work for to provide capabilities that support the way they communicate, the way they collaborate, and the way they learn. That means tools with social embedded in the functionality—not slapped on as an afterthought. If those capabilities aren’t inherent in the systems that companies provide them, they’re probably going to work somewhere else.

From a corporate perspective, we expect HCM tools to enable employees to communicate more clearly and more quickly with their managers and with the company at large, and to make it easier for the company to communicate with its employees about product launches or changes in policy. “From a strategic perspective,” says Tim Jennings, chief research officer at IT consultancy Ovum IT, “I feel companies are prioritizing the recruitment, management, and optimization of their workforce as their most critical business capability, and understanding that they can apply a data-driven scientific approach, enabled by powerful new software tools.”

As Ellison put it during his keynote at Oracle OpenWorld 2014:

“There’s got to be a graceful, easy, efficient way for two-way communication between employee and company and company and employee. That’s social HCM. Employees have to be able to organize into groups and collaborate. That’s social HCM. And the twenty-first century HCM is something we think we excel at because we’re good at not only payroll, benefits, those kinds of things, but we have all of the social tools that allow us to enable this particular suite of applications, to be more than twentieth-century HCM on premise, to be social HCM, in the cloud.”

Social also implies mobile and cloud. Winning organizations are increasingly putting information, decision-making tools, and HR apps in the hands of people who work outside headquarters—whether in the field or from home offices.

An increasingly complex maze of regulations is also making it harder for organizations to manage a global workforce using legacy HR applications.

All these factors sound like ominous premonitions of heavy IT lifts, complexity, integration woes, and large financial investments. What customers need is an approach that removes complexity, allows businesses to move to the cloud at their own pace, and to create their own applications using a single, unified platform. That’s precisely why Oracle has such an advantage in this space.

It works with existing systems. Oracle’s HCM suite of applications includes on-premise and cloud-based HCM and enterprise resource planning, as well as customer experience applications. They’re built in the same technology set, on the same platform, sharing the same database, the same data structure on the same Platform as a Service and Infrastructure as a Service capabilities. This allows customers to develop an HCM program and expand at the time and in the way that they see fit.

That sounds like a pretty logical construct that every technology vendor would offer its customers. But that’s far from the case. “No one else offers their platform to extend their SaaS applications. That would be nobody…. Most of our SaaS competitors don’t have any platform at all,” Ellison said.

The platform is the network. Customers can use Oracle’s PaaS to build new extensions and plug those right into the app because they’re hosted on a platform using the same technology as that used to build the HCM app.

“We are the only cloud vendor on the planet Earth that allows you to use the platform that we develop on for you to extend the SaaS applications on,” Ellison said. “We build Oracle core HCM on top of our cloud platform, using our database,” so that customers can extend their applications and migrate seamlessly from on-premise to cloud, or vice versa, as needed.

Social is the new black. Job postings, internal referrals, collaboration, and communication tools are based on new and emerging social tools that are already embedded in Oracle’s cloud HCM application. For example, retailers are using Twitter to recruit seasonal staff who performed best for them during the previous holiday season—something possible only because social tools are baked into Oracle’s recruiting and performance management tools.

Oracle’s HCM applications include social capabilities that allow people to “form into groups and collaborate; allow employees to communicate more efficiently with their managers, managers to communicate more efficiently with their employees, the company to communicate more efficiently with its employees, and so on,” said Ellison. That’s why social capabilities and Facebook-like interfaces are built into Oracle’s platform, Ellison said.

Global means it’s extensible. Most technology vendors support multiple currencies, date formats, languages—the table stakes. But Oracle stands out because it also allows for variances in regulations, from setting policies for what type of data managers in one country can see about their employees in another country, to governance about what kind of data can be stored from country to country. It’s an expertise born of decades developing HR software.

“We support basically every country in the world with statutory requirements as well as the ability to extend those statutory requirements,” said Steve Miranda, Oracle’s executive vice president of applications development, during a meeting with financial analysts on October 2, 2014.

Standards-based future-proofing. Oracle customers have every reason to be confident that their current investments will carry forward to the next generation of technology, just as it has been able to migrate from a pre-Android era to the world we know today. Oracle has improved its user interface and made applications run on smartphones and other mobile devices because we used standard Java and standard HTML when building Oracle Fusion Applications, anticipating that those technologies would run on the most modern user interfaces.
“And as things continue to change beyond tablets to wearable devices or the watches, whatever the next device that may come, we feel extraordinarily confident based on history that by basing it on standards, the new devices will run those standards, and we’re going to be quickest to market in terms of best-in-class user interface,” Miranda said.
You’re going to be hearing a lot about HCM in the weeks and months to come. And Oracle has an advantage in this space because HCM is inextricably bound up with everything else that organizations do. And that happens to be an area Oracle understands better than niche vendors with narrow product lines—which is why Oracle customers will end up in a better position to win real-world talent contests of their own.


Michael Hickins is a director of strategic communications at Oracle. He is the former editor of The Wall Street Journal's CIO Journal.
https://blogs.oracle.com/OracleHCM/entry/old_school_tools_and_techniques