Living with the Cloud - Oracle

Living with the Cloud

6 Things to Consider When Moving to the Oracle HCM Cloud

An Oracle White Paper

April 2015

Contents

A New Way of Working.......................................................................................................................03 1. It Pays to Stay Engaged.................................................................................................................05 2. You May Need New Roles, and New Skills..................................................................................06 3. You May Need to Take a Fresh Approach to Governance.........................................................07 4. You'll See a Shift in Responsibilities Between IT and HR Teams..............................................08 5. Consider How to Provide System Support...................................................................................09 6. Prepare for Ongoing Testing and Training....................................................................................10 Two Steps to Getting it Right First Time............................................................................................ 11 Summary and Conclusion.................................................................................................................. 11

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A new life, and a new way of working

If you're reading this whitepaper, you've almost certainly already spent a good deal of time considering the virtues of a cloud-based HR system. And there are many.

From a business point of view, choosing to buy your HR software as a service keeps you up-to-date with the latest functionality and innovation--ensuring you never fall behind the market, or the competition. Put simply, your system just gets better and better. Cloud HR also offers:

? A system that's fast to deploy, and easy to use ? A simple way to embrace modern work styles, with mobile access and

collaboration tools

? New cost flexibility, only paying for what you need, when you need it, and with the chance to turn CAPEX into OPEX by paying through revenue

From an IT point of view, cloud-based HR removes the need to go through a major upgrade every few years, with all the associated disruption. Instead, updates are simple and regular, and IT time is freed up to focus on value-adding projects.

But it's important to remember, adopting a new, cloud-based HR system--and fully realising those benefits--also means adopting a new way of working.

There'll be some changes you would expect, but also some you might not have considered--from how the relationship between your HR and IT departments will alter, to how you'll handle ongoing governance. Along the way, you'll almost certainly need to create some new processes, and develop some new skills. It isn't just the relationship between HR and IT that changes when your move to the Oracle HCM Cloud, the relationship between your organisation and Oracle changes too.

We become providers of an ongoing service, maintaining, investing in, and consistently working to enhance both your HR applications and the technology stack that supports it.

We also create and share a schedule for updates and upgrades, ensuring you know what new fixes and functionality are available when. As you would expect, we test updates and upgrades in-house before they're released, but you retain control when it comes to applying and managing them, and verifying that they work within your own setup/configuration and with your wider systems environment.

Building a life in the cloud together

What Oracle does:

? We publish policies that cover our service lifecycle processes ? We provision, maintain, and update Oracle HCM Cloud Service for you ? We publish a schedule of updates and upgrades for maintaining the software ? We provide pre-upgrade plans and surveys ? We publish detailed notes with each release and run awareness sessions ? We send you regular service notifications ? We provide standard support services via My Oracle Support ? We provide a range of request-based services (e.g. environment refreshes,

upgrade scheduling, language pack requests)

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We can also offer: ? Access to Oracle Applications Customer Connect, our thriving partner and customer

community ? A dedicated Customer Success Manager--to act as your single point of contact with

Oracle, and working proactively with you to help you get the most from life in the cloud What you do: ? You administer and support your Oracle HCM Cloud Service, working with your

business users, Oracle and any other third-parties Life in the cloud is cyclical. Updates are currently released monthly, and upgrades twice a year. You'll need to understand each one, communicate its value to business users, and check to see that it doesn't cause any issues in your own, unique IT environment. (We'll talk about testing in more detail later.) Updating best practices: ? Adopt a monthly update cadence wherever possible ? Wait for fixes to be delivered in the next available monthly update bundle ? Look out for outage notifications--sent in advance of every update event ? Test critical business processes after every update cycle Upgrade best practices: ? Action instructions given in upgrade-related notifications ? Review the release, notes and attend the relevant Customer Connect

awareness sessions ? Understand features that are delivered active, and those that require activation

or configuration ? Clearly define your change management, communication and test plans We've produced this whitepaper based on our extensive experience of helping organisations transition to this new way of working, and adapt quickly and successfully to life in the cloud. It's designed to get you thinking about some important questions early on, and help you get everything your cloud solution has to give--from the moment it goes live, to many years down the line. In summary, there are 6 key issues that you need to consider and plan for.

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"You can't underestimate the continual requirement for change management."

Jacqui Mallin People Director, Operational Excellence, Standard Life

1. It pays to stay engaged

Organisations that see the greatest return on Oracle HCM Cloud tend to have one thing in common--they take an ongoing, active interest in the system, from knowing all its current capabilities, to shaping its future ones.

Customer Viewpoint: Jacqui Mallin, Standard Life

"You can't underestimate the continual requirement for change management. In a traditional on-premise environment, IT would have been responsible for upgrades, and their focus would have been on the technical aspects of it. HR would only have got involved at the acceptance testing stage. Now, HR is responsible for moving to each new release of the software, and we try upfront to understand how it will affect our business and how we can best manage the change.

We maintain an ongoing change function, dedicated to managing change around the evolving features of the software. We introduced process leaders responsible for certain parts of the product, for example a performance management process lead and a talent process lead. They engage directly with subject matter experts in these areas and make sure their needs are reflected in the new features of the software that we adopt. It's quite different from a traditional HR architecture."

We encourage all our customers to get involved with the Oracle HCM Cloud user community, whether that's through Oracle Applications Customer Connect, or other user networks. By contributing to the Oracle HCM Cloud Idea Lab, you can also help guide development, and ensure it continues to serve your own evolving needs.

To learn more about the benefits of active, continuing engagement, read our whitepaper, Oracle HCM Cloud Solutions: Your Essential Guide to Getting Maximum Value from Your Oracle HCM Cloud.

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