Eating the dog food - collaboration from an inside Oracle PoV
- Summary:
- One of the important side benefits of increasing digitalisation is the ability create new models of collaboration both within a company and between a company and its customers, partners and suppliers. Some of Oracle’s senior UK managers took time out at the recent Modern Business Experience event to offer some 'how to’ tips.
But it is fair to say that the tools for building a collaborative work environment now exist and are starting to move centre stage. For example, Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are now widely accepted as the preferred glue between different applications, to the point where it is now possible to link widely different applications types together to build increasingly rich business services.
It is fast becoming a relatively trivial task to use APIs to connect consumer-facing webservices with new cloud-based business services and trusted, business-critical back office legacy `systems of record’ in real-time collaborative environments. These have the potential to significantly boost business productivity and that most important factor for business managers – time to cash.
So the technical road blocks to collaboration are now disappearing and many are gone already. The company culture issue is still, however, very much present. And it is being joined by a new encumbrance – the simple question: if it is now possible, what should we do with the capability?
These were the issues set before a panel session held at Oracle's Modern Business Experience event in London. This brought together three of Oracle’s senior UK management - CFO Rupert Haines, CFO, CMO Amanda Jobbins and Senior HR Director Cathy Temple to discuss their own experiences in building more, and better, collaboration within both the Oracle organization and in those customer organizations they get called in to advise.
Are you fragmented?
The first issue they addressed was whether businesses are actually fragmented and if that was having a negative effect on them? It would be easy to assume the answer was yes, but the panel saw it as a more complex mashup of issues. For example, Temple observed that the degree of fragmentation often depended on the size of the organisation, while Jobbins could see a growing awareness amongst businesses as the competitive nature of the marketplace started to push departments within a business to work more closely together.
As Haines observed, some of the fragmentation had its roots in technology and history:
Fragmentation exists, but there were not the benefits from technology available before. They were always fragmented, partly because they were using the point solutions that were available at the time. By consolidating and using collaborative services within Oracle has saved the company 10% of its revenue, and now we are in a world of dramatic change people are starting to get the need for it.
Interestingly, there was some consensus that fragmentation can be OK in the right circumstances, particularly where the issue of different skills sets is relevant. But it is a fragmentation accepted on a more granular scale as the need now is to get all staff working with a common purpose. To this end, they saw cloud services helping to make that happen.
Senior management is still an important focal point of leadership in getting a company culture to move towards collaboration. As Temple said:
The boardroom has to be looked at for leadership, and boardrooms are becoming more fluid. They now tend to invite those with the relevant knowledge in to talk to them directly. There is a ned now for them to learn from all the functions in the business that have something of value to add, and that needs to be taken on board.
Getting the board on board
The technology may be available but that in itself is a stumbling block for collaborative services, with Jobbins noting that most people are afraid of change. This becomes another issue for the boardroom, because it is the role of leadership to drive and enthuse staff in the acceptance and benefits of technology change. The same is true for financial issues, as Haines noted.
The financial leadership has to come from the very top and the message must be clear and consistent, as it is quite likely that things will get rocky and tough. There is also the problem of whether such leaders can be grown inside the business. Often it is the implanting of an external, career leader comes in. But yes, growing them internally can be done and it is something we encourage in Oracle.
There can be many advantages of greater collaboration, not least in building greater trust between a business and its customers, partners, suppliers and the like. According to Jobbins, Oracle is aiming at becoming a real service-based organisation and be more symbiotic with customers. There is a real need now to move away from its history as just a supplier of packaged applications and become one that offers customers much more choice and flexibility, as these days users need to see tangible benefits, and they need to be seen clearly and quickly.
One of those benefits, especially in these days of a growing range of encumbrances to travelling that even stop staff getting to their place of work, is the ability to work remotely. This, by definition, requires a rich array of collaborative tools and technologies. Indeed, Haines sees such collaboration helping Oracle become a service-based organisation which in turn helps to develop what he called customer advocacy – those `sticky’ customers that become fans of a brand that are willing to speak on its behalf.
It also brings advantages within the business itself, particularly in terms of its operations, as Jobbings noted:
Collaboration means that the different systems, especially measuring systems, can be brought together to create what we call a shared victory plan.
This is the Oracle term for that over-arching single view of what is happening in the business, what should be happening, and what may need to happen now to make those two the same.
All three see the role that technology plays in creating and delivering collaboration as critical. But as Haines observed, it can come with a price tag for some businesses:
The integration piece does mean that users have to have fairly standardised business processes, especially in financial areas, in order to move from their existing work environments easily.
There is also the need for the service deliverer to keep telling the users what the business benefits are for them, and delivering them on plan. So communications and collaboration both up and down the organisation and across it – and with customers and suppliers/partners – are still the key to getting the best out of the business. Collaborative services, once in place, are then most likely to make those communications faster, richer and more effective.
My take
One of the key takeaways from this session was the suggestion that vendors need to keep telling customers and users about the benefits of collaboration loudly and frequently, and it would have been beneficial for the panel to have included a customer or two to do some of that shouting. Worked examples from experienced users are always worth hearing. The learned lessons discussed were hardly original, but well wort the re-stating – not least the need for real leadership from board level downwards.