Want More From Your Quarterly Cloud Updates? Here’s A 4-Step Plan To Take Advantage Of New …
Blog: Oracle BPM
The power of cloud applications is that they provide more value with every quarterly update, helping companies keep up with customer expectations that are evolving at a faster-than-ever pace. Organizations must continuously transform or risk being left behind.
But it’s important to have a plan so you can take advantage of the innovation. Here at Oracle, we’re no different than our customers: We’re using Oracle Cloud to improve our customer and employee experiences, but we reimagined our application deployment methodology to get the most from the stream of new features.
For example, since our implementation of Oracle ERP Cloud for expenses in January 2018, we have leveraged each of the quarterly updates to better deliver on our vision for an intuitive and delightful employee experience. Since our initial go-live date, we’ve implemented new features that have reduced manual data entry, eliminated unnecessary data capture, and simplified the user interface so employees can make quicker and easier expense submissions.
Here’s the 4-step methodology we use for managing quarterly updates, which has helped us to add an average of 100 new features every quarter:
1. Analyze. Oracle’s IT and business teams evaluate new features to prioritize the uptake of those that improve the user experience and productivity.
2. Plan. The teams collaborate on the strategy for the uptake of new features and go-live, including operational changes resulting from user experience improvements as well as communications to impacted teams and users.
3. Test. Regression and user acceptance testing are conducted on key flows to ensure systems continue to run smoothly and new functionality works as intended.
4. Launch. New features are enabled on the go-live date, and to ensure ongoing success, teams continuously track user feedback and plan for improvements in future updates.
We’ve Learned Along the Way…
Here are a few concepts we’ve learned that help us ensure we are leveraging new features to their full potential and achieving our goal for delivering exceptional experiences even as expectations change.
Collaborate for success. IT and business teams must share a common vision and understanding of how they can innovate to deliver exceptional experiences, and they must work together to ensure ongoing goal attainment.
Develop a streamlined process to manage updates. Don’t miss out on opportunities to innovate the experiences you deliver. Instead, define a simple methodology for reviewing and adopting new features. We learned, for example, that we were wasting time on duplicate testing between IT and business teams and that we need to test only key use cases prior to going live.
Communicate, but don’t worry about announcing every single feature. For example, when we began implementing a digital assistant for expenses, we told employees because we knew they’d be excited. But when we simplified payment notifications, we spared employees the details of what was an intuitive improvement to the experience.
Remain flexible to meet your business needs. While you should enable features that improve the user experience as soon as possible, if you are not prepared to launch in the quarter they are released, there is nothing preventing you from waiting. With Oracle Cloud, you have the flexibility to choose when to enable incremental innovations.
- To find out more about Oracle’s business transformation, visit oracle.com/oracleatoracle.
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