Every fall for the past 7 years I visit San Francisco to attend Oracle’s OpenWorld conference. Once again, I was left with a very positive view of how far Oracle has come. In my last article covering Oracle product announcements at Modern Business Experience, I wrote, “As Chris Leone, senior vice president of development, Oracle HCM Cloud stated, “We put the big boulders behind us that had to be addressed behind the scenes” things like building out recruiting and learning etc. Now Oracle has moved into the finer areas that will help you strategically. I liked their term for what stage they are at presently: “Think Chess, Not Checkers.”

Well, once again, they added some very intriguing updates that focus squarely on improving the Human Experience for both the workforce and the HR function all at the same time, which sometimes isn’t the case with other offerings. In fact, Oracle is positioned as a Leader in Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud HCM Suites for 1,000+ Employee Enterprises. Gartner placed them furthest for Completeness of Vision within the Entire Magic Quadrant. I believe that says something.


How have they gotten here? The Oracle HCM Cloud solution has been in development for 7 years and their success can be largely related to their massive R&D investments. Last year Oracle invested $6B in R&D, $1B in the cloud alone and have more than 2,250 developers in the HCM Cloud alone. The result has been 20 updates since inception and over 1,800 live customers (400 new in the past 12 months alone).

Further to this, Oracle has their HCM solution on the same platform that runs the entire Oracle ERP suite. This allows usage of the same underlying tech and data modeling which allows for seamless integration across all modules and allows for advanced analytics across the suite using AI and Machine Learning. This is an advantage as there are no integrations to worry about and data and insights are fully available across the entire suite.You can click here to see the entire presentaion or just read on.

So what’s New for your Workforce?


New User Experience: First of all, Oracle has redesigned the entire user experience which has been a work in progress for 18 months. The end result is a beautiful new look and feel with a mobile responsive design that enables users to get what they need without sending them to deep links where they find it difficult to navigate back. The system will connect with the user in whatever way they prefer, text, Slack or other ways. This new user experience is called Redwood – check out a quick overview here:



Connect to the System with Voice or Text: Oracle has created the ability to converse to the system using text or voice conversations to the Oracle Digital Assistant. The system has gone well past just answering simple questions like how much vacation time do I have to goes beyond just delivering up answers to common questions such as vacation days.  Oracle Digital Assistant can now suggest next steps and recommendations within the context of employee conversations. New capabilities include access to onboarding tasks, goals, and performance evaluations, and the availability of manager self-service actions via Oracle Digital Assistant.

LinkedIn Integration: Last year, Oracle announced with LinkedIn a new partnership that would allow for full integration of LinkedIn data in the Recruiting System while allowing information inside the recruiting system (Taleo and HCM Recruiting Cloud) into LinkedIn Recruiter. I saw a demo of this at LinkedIn Talent Connect last week and it really allows the recruiter to see all relevant information in a single spot, like if this person has applied before inside your company, any notes etc. (information from the ATS is shown in Recruiter) which saves the recruiter at least 10% of their time. This allows them to be more productive and spend more time on higher value tasks.

This year, they have gone live with the connection to the recruiting system. Now they have gone further with LinkedIn Profile Import – In fact, Oracle is the only partner that LinkedIn has enabled LinkedIn Profile Import with. Most companies don’t have the latest instance of an employees LinkedIn profile and are therefore lacking the insights into the various skills, accolades etc. that their employee might have. With LinkedIn Profile Import, candidates can easily upload their latest profile giving them the ability to showcase their strengths to their employer and open up new possible opportunities for their career. This helps employees find new growth opportunities and provides employers with the insights they need to encourage more internal mobility.

A new way for your workforce to connect with the new Oracle Connections: To help businesses build a stronger workplace culture, Oracle Connections makes it quick and easy for employees to connect with team members from across the organization. Every employee has a profile page to share skills, interests, successful projects, build tribes, and write on people’s walls and more.

Oracle Connections also provides a new consumer-like experience to the employee directory and lets teams provide and collect feedback within the Connections network.

So what’s New for your HR Function?
Oracle HCM Cloud workflows have been automated to help HR professionals save time by simplifying and streamlining tasks:

Event-Based Processes: New features automate multi-step processes for event-based tasks. For example, when an employee gets married they have to change their name, address, tax forms, etc. With Event-Based Processes, the system simplifies the process for employees by aggregating all necessary steps and automating mundane tasks.

HCM Experience Design Studio: Updates to HCM Experience Design Studio help HR teams quickly and easily design comprehensive business processes and workflows, as well as create customer-defined defaulting and validation logic. For example, customers can use conditional defaulting to automatically set full- or part-time status based on work hours, without the need for IT support.

Oracle is the first vendor that has allowed HR to put Validation Logic into specific flows based on specific geography legislation, company guidelines. life events etc. to eliminate the need for HR to go back into the system to fix improperly entered data by the end user. For example, a worker may be planning on getting married on the 1st of the month and proactively changes their marital status prior to the wedding date but then something happens and they don’t get married. HR would have to manually go back into the system to correct this. By putting validation logic into the workflow, the system can be told not to change the status until the date of or one day later. Fixing improperly entered data can be a nightmare for HR and now this has been eliminated.

Intuitive Self-Service for complex, industry-specific workflows: New self-service capabilities improve ease-of-use for position management. This is particularly beneficial for position-run organizations in higher education, healthcare, and public sector industries where HR needs to set up automatic rules and position progressions when managing headcount.

My Take
Oracle now has as many live implementations as anyone in the mid to enterprise market and has witnessed massive growth in the past 12 months (going from 1,400 to 1,800 implementations). Their investment into the development of platform (with 2,250 developers on the HCM product alone) will no doubt continue to yield fascinating advances designed to impact the human experience in your company (both the workforce and HR). I believe that they have a very good understanding of the issues affecting modern business and that helps them drive innovation in the right direction and look forward to seeing what they announce at the next Modern Business Experience event next spring.