|
Plan Your OHUG Global Conference Education Experience
The education agenda for the OHUG 2015 Global Conference is now available on the OHUG website. Check it out, and start planning your education experience!
Use the search fields to find the Breakout, Meet the Expert, Keynote, Product Roadmap and SIG/RUG sessions that are relevant to you. Click on the session titles in your search results for full session details.
Highlights this year include:
- Record number of customer case study sessions
- Basic Learn Administrator Workshop (free with conference registration)
- Joel Zeff Keynote
- Oracle-presented Meet the Expert, Product Roadmap and Keynote sessions
- Solutions Theater Demos, Customer Connection Sessions and interactive Product Spotlight Forums presented by Oracle partners
Register now.
Headlines
News from OHUG
Webinar Today: Why Leading Remotely is Different (And Why It's Not)
Date: Wednesday, April 15
Time: noon to 1 p.m. CT
Featured Speakers: Wayne Turmel, founder and president of GreatWebMeetings.com, and Kevin Eikenberry, founder and Chief Potential Officer of The Kevin Eikenberry Group
More and more organizations and their leaders are leading teams that are scattered across geography, time zones and even countries. Do the old rules apply when you don't see your people? Can you lead, inspire, coach and get the most from teams that are connected by technology, and seldom (if ever) see each other face to face? The answer is yes, if you stop to think about what has changed, what needs to be adjusted and what remains true for all teams.
Register now.
Highlighted Conference Track: How to Thrive in the Cloud
In the session search page on the OHUG website, you can choose a track and the page will populate with all the sessions offered within that track. For example, in choosing "Oracle HCM Cloud: How to Thrive in the Cloud," the results include nine cloud sessions:
- How to Work in the Cloud – How to Take Control of Your Own Instance and Testing Strategy
- Oracle HCM Cloud User Experiences: Designed for Work Styles Across Devices
- Supporting the User Experience!
- Oracle HCM and ERP … A Global Single Instance for Your Enterprise
- Implementation of a Mobile Centric Tool for a Company
- What to Expect When You’re Expecting HCM Cloud
- Moving to the Cloud? Navigate Key Barriers to Boost Success
- Plotting the Course: Defining Your Road Map to a Full Fusion HCM Solution
- Successful International Implementation of a Cloud Service
Try it out!
The Tao of Ta Da: Watch What Happens When Work Becomes Play
 The keynote speaker at this year's OHUG Global Conference, Joel Zeff, is a dynamic speaker, humorist and author. His interactive performances invite audience members to participate in hilarious improvisational exercises that illustrate his central message: Organizations and individuals should celebrate every day successes to increase collaboration, productivity, passion and innovation.
Zeff also abides by the "Tao of Ta Da." Somewhere along the way, adults lose their sense of excitement. Our tanks are empty. There is no fuel for collaboration, productivity and innovation. When employees and managers are not enjoying their work, they become people who don’t care about taking care of the customer, meeting goals, producing results or having fun.
Employees and managers who have fun at their jobs are more loyal, enthusiastic and passionate. They sell more, communicate more effectively, take better care of customers, and produce more sustainable results. And fun increases employee retention.
In Zeff's motivational keynote presentation, employees will appreciate the value of fun in the workplace and learn how to increase their passion and success.
Attend an Oracle HCM Cloud Partner Summit
Registration for two new Oracle HCM Cloud Partner Summits is now open. Oracle partners can get development efforts under way before the fiscal year even starts. The Oracle Applications User Experience (OAUX) team wants to help develop the next wave of go-to partners in FY '16. They are looking for partners at the VP level and/or with business development or implementation practice responsibilities. They are especially focused on midsize partners or partners who are in a new or developing HCM Cloud practice. This is event is a must for HCM or ERP partners considering the move to Oracle HCM Cloud or in the process of transformation.
Milan Summit: April 21-22, 2015 - Register now
Oracle Headquarters Summit: April 28-29, 2015 - Register now
Check Out the OAUX Voice of User Experience Blog
The OAUX team wants to help partners stay ahead of the curve. Learn how we can do that in this post from the Voice of User Experience (VoX) blog, "Helping Partners Compete on User Experience with the Oracle Applications Cloud."
Some of our workshop participants even come out of these intensive, hands-on events with actual product. Read more about a recent workshop we held in this post from the Usable Apps blog, "Oracle PaaS4SaaS UX Enablement with Certus Solutions: Valid Business Proposition." Get another take on the Certus PaaS4SaaS event from Certus' Debra Lilley on the Oracle Fusion Middleware blog in a post called "Partner Column: Extending Your SaaS Applications with PaaS."
Exclusive Event: Oracle Hosts User Feedback Sessions at the OHUG 2015 Global Conference
Make a difference in the usability of Oracle HCM applications, and sign up for one of the user feedback sessions at the OHUG 2015 Global Conference. You can preview the product designs for desktop and mobile applications of Oracle HCM Cloud and PeopleSoft HCM. Your input will help Oracle continue to develop intuitive and easy-to-use applications. If you’re attending OHUG 2015 Global Conference, don't forget to sign up!
Oracle's usability experts will guide you through practical learning sessions on the user experience of various Oracle HCM applications. All user feedback sessions will be conducted on June 9-10 at The Mirage Hotel in Las Vegas.
This event fills up quickly, and seats are limited. Advance registration is required. In order to reserve a spot for yourself and your colleagues, or to get additional info, please contact Jeannette Chadwick.
Want to learn more about Oracle Applications User Experience team, visit UsableApps.
Attend Oracle CloudWorld on April 30
The cloud is not new. Yet it has ushered in a new era in business. In today's hyper-connected and fast moving world, large enterprises must move like start-ups, nimbly adapting to whatever changes come. This is a modern business. And to be a modern business, you need a modern cloud.
Attend Oracle CloudWorld in San Jose on April 30 to learn how to transform your organization.
Learn more and register.
Industry News
Oracle CEO Touts Progress in HCM Software
SearchFinancialApplications (03/27/15) Ring, Dan
Oracle CEO Mark Hurd cited human capital management software as essential to Oracle's success over the next 10 years. He stressed the overriding importance that Oracle be an early HCM software developer, remain committed to its development and get it right. Hurd said many organizations are more willing to consider a cloud HCM software migration because human resources is not viewed as mission-critical. "The reason I think HCM is so important is that historically HR has been the least served function in most companies," he said. "They typically fall behind. Why? The CEO is riveted around revenue growth. If the CEO has revenue growth, the CEO typically survives. If the CEO doesn’t have revenue growth, the CEO doesn’t survive." Hurd also said Oracle is working to its Taleo recruitment software. "We’re trying to get Taleo to a common user interface, do more integration at the workflow level, do more integration at the data structure level,” he reported. Hurd noted his company spent seven years developing its first HCM cloud software product. “We are committed end to end because of the implication it has on the broader ecosystem,” he emphasized. “This is not a sprint. We want to win today but we are in it for the long run. This is probably a decade-long run.”
Oracle HCM Cloud Adds Social, Mobile Learning Option
InformationWeek (03/30/15) Henschen, Doug
The release of Oracle Learning Cloud marks Oracle's adoption of social- and mobile-enabled learning management amid a corporate shift from formal, classroom-style courseware and learning modules to more informal training. "These days, people are learning by sharing videos on YouTube or going to Kahn Academy, Coursera or other sources online," noted Oracle's Gretchen Alarcon. "We looked at that trend and decided to bring that style of peer-to-peer learning into the enterprise." Oracle Learning Cloud is designed to enable employees at all enterprise levels to produce videos that can be curated by human resources or business leaders into learning tracks configured for specific departments and roles. "A manager can point to these tracks and say, 'I would like people in my organization to learn the following, so please follow this track,'" Alarcon said. The new product is available as a standalone offering, but it also is integrated with the Oracle Human Capital Management Cloud and its employee profile systems, enabling employees to share with peers and promote career development on their own by following leaders and role models to see what videos or documents they have shared or viewed. "HR and business leaders must ... create a culture where employees want to share their knowledge and encourage them to engage with each other in new and creative ways," said Oracle HCM Development's Chris Leone. "The new Oracle Learning Cloud helps companies provide employees with a consumer-like experience to help retain and develop the talent they need to be successful."
3 Ways HR Can Understand the Workplace of the Future
Personnel Today (03/13/15) Everett, Cath
With experts predicting a wealth of technological disruptions to human resources in the next decade, HR must develop an appropriate response strategy. One forecast is that the deep embedding of technology in working culture and everyday life will cause work and personal time to overlap more. Social systems such as Twitter will enable global network members to work instantly, facilitating easier collaboration and reducing the sense of isolation among far-flung employees. This also will give individual employees more control over personal data than previously, and for HR to accommodate this will require practitioners to familiarize themselves with social networking tools and other disruptive technologies, and accept the redefinition of policies around social media use and the like as work-life integration grows tighter. Another major prediction is the physical contraction and flattening hierarchy of organizations in the next 10 years, with a core nexus of staff and managers, many of whom telecommute, constituting such firms. Regardless of location, this expert core will uphold the organization's strategy, values and ethics, and HR must lead support and training efforts to ensure managers have the requisite skills to operate in this new paradigm. Managers will need to become adept networkers with exceptional people management skills, and also focus centrally on corporate social responsibility. A third projected HR workplace development is the growing strategic value of HR as operational functions are automated or outsourced. Learning and development will increasingly be concerned with curating content from various sources as and when needed.
Corporate Survival Requires Real-Time HR Practices
Forbes (03/23/15) Dussert, Bertrand
Corporate survival in the coming years can only be realized by highly adaptable organizations, and this imperative is spurring chief human resources officers (CHROs) to rethink their HR processes by focusing on three key areas, according to Oracle's Bertrand Dussert. Those areas include continuous communication about employee performance, continuous tracking of employee sentiment and continuous recruitment of top talent. Dussert said the first area involves CHROs updating traditional HR activities into near-real-time operations to ensure early and frequent feedback via modern, ongoing assessment. The second area cultivates closer engagement between managers and employees, while data flows into refined analytics systems to help leaders better understand employee sentiment. Dussert noted CHROs are becoming more adept at identifying "sentiment vectors," or mixes of the direction, speed and rate of acceleration or deceleration in a trend. He said being able to read prevailing trends and how quickly they are changing is a valuable strategic benefit in an environment that calls for adaptability. The third area of concentration is implemented by CHROs who ensure recruiters remain closely engaged with the organization's top talent, and give them instruments for continually communicating with peers about the value of working at their firm. Dussert said this means the traditional employee-referral model is transforming into a program in which employees share their feelings about their organization and its culture — and foster a central talent base.
Less Than Half of HR Leaders Rate Their Programs as 'Good' or 'Excellent'
Bloomberg BNA (03/16/15) Berman-Gorvine, Martin
Just 39 percent of more than 3,300 surveyed human resources leaders from 106 countries designated their organization's HR and talent programs as good or excellent, according to a new Deloitte report. Bersin by Deloitte founder Josh Bersin said the problem stems from many HR practices' lack of alignment with business challenges confronting companies, "so they have a tendency to create 'programs' that aren't necessarily driving the impact leaders want. It's very hard to recruit, lead, manage and develop people in today's competitive environment, and the old fashioned 'HR generalist' skill set is not enough." Bersin said HR teams should refocus their internal skills and align more closely with the business while assuming more risks with new technologies and solutions. Other key findings of the report include growing prioritization of "softer" areas such as culture and engagement, leadership and development. Meanwhile, survey respondents have ascribed more importance to leadership and learning in the past year, with nearly a third more respondents rating them very important this year compared to last year. The Deloitte study also found HR departments and HR professionals' skills are lagging behind business needs. Meanwhile, Deloitte reported slow progress on talent and people analytics despite their high priority, and nearly 75 percent of respondents stressed the need to simplify their work environments, but said "HR is part of the problem."
E&P Firm Sends HR Function to the Cloud
Business Cloud News (03/24/15)
Newfield Exploration plans to simplify its global human resources operations and boost mobile-friendliness with its deployment of Oracle Human Capital Management Cloud. The firm said its goal is to enhance employee access to central HR resources and improve global collaboration. The company also said the HR cloud migration will serve to lower its maintenance costs and help its IT department concentrate on end-user delivery and adoption. In addition, Newfield will deploy Oracle HCM Cloud Mobile as the mobile interface its workforce will use when the application is rolled out later this year. “Advanced technologies like Oracle HCM Cloud are critical to our success as a company that thrives on discovering and working in uncharted territories,” said Newfield's Thomas Smouse. “With Oracle HCM Cloud, we are transforming the way we communicate our goals throughout the organization, creating a more transparent environment." Smouse also said increased clarity around goals will lead to better collaboration and more productive employees focused on common milestones, which he says, "inevitably results in better business outcomes."
Advances in HR Technology Have the Power to Reshape Global Enterprise, Says Expert Panel
Online Recruitment Magazine (03/26/15)
A panel of leading human resources technology experts agreed such technology needs to enable workplace productivity, and they foresee a slate of new HR tech solutions boosting employee engagement. They also concurred HR leaders can play an increasingly essential role in executive decision-making by facilitating access to real-time information, while enterprises that demonstrate technological leadership will be leading competitors for talent. In addition, the panel stressed the next wave of technology must be intuitive so it can meet the needs of millennial employees. “In HR you own the last digital mile, you have the power to generate engagement through the use of that tool, to generate interest, and most importantly — to convey the corporate culture,” |