Why Cloud Technology is the Secret to CHRO Success

With an ever-changing workforce, having the right type of CHRO is now more important than ever. That’s because the value of talent to a business – any business – is immense. With unemployment at historic lows, the struggle to attract and hire the best talent is tougher than it has been in decades. And the struggle to retain them is just as tough.

The CHRO’s use of technology and other tools has changed significantly over the years, too. The need to quickly adopt and put technology and best practices in place is growing every day. When you’re a CHRO and sitting at the table, having the right technology at your fingertips can make or break success, for you and the business.

First, of course, technology helps you automate routine tasks related to talent acquisition. At a basic level, the more companies can automate these tasks the better. More importantly, though, is that millennials are at the height of demand. This generation is well-educated about technology and they know how to adapt quickly. They grew up online and they expect technology in the workplace to give them the same experience they expect as consumers – seamless and gratifying.

This goes well beyond the hiring process or benefits. Career mobility, for example, is a very material part of what CHROs face every day, and an area where technology is key. Millennials appear very eager to move around a company. Providing them that opportunity can make or break your attrition statistics.

Deloitte reports that almost half of millennials envision leaving their jobs within two years; Gallup calls millennials the “job-hopping generation” and noted that fewer than three in 10 millennials feel engaged in the workplace. And when they leave because they lack mobility and engagement, they share their displeasure on social media.

All of this puts a lot of demand on the technology you choose. It needs to deliver real value to you, solve traditional and new HR problems, and offer a vision for the future when things like AI, machine learning, predictive analytics and voice interaction will be standard. It needs to integrate from back office to front office seamlessly. It needs to keep up with the pace of change. And it needs to be super easy to use.

After spending a decade creating a natively built “cloud-based” HCM system that’s entirely different from the competition, I believe Oracle’s HCM Cloud delivers on all these requirements We have the broadest suite of HCM applications in the market today, and we’ve invested heavily in a new user experience and new UI.

Another key differentiator for us is that we control our own costs because we’ve built the best cloud infrastructure in the industry. Larry Ellison talked about this in his Oracle OpenWorld keynote. A lot of our competitors put their customers into a multi-tenant cloud – where you share the same systems and storage as other companies. They then rely on a third party for the underlying infrastructure. The costs of these solution providers is out of your control, and many are increasing their renewal rates well into the double digit percentages. And that’s not to mention the security implications…

Our entire set of application offerings are built natively for the cloud, and we manage our own environment. You also get a single tenancy platform that removes those security risks. We’ve integrated the front office and back office into a single, unified application platform on an autonomous database that perpetually optimizes itself.

When ERP and HCM work together with customer experience applications, it leads to bigger value and a much better customer experience.

Oracle’s focus is on ensuring every single customer realizes the full value and potential of the promises we make. We’ve delivered 98 percent of our product roadmap commitments in the last 12 months alone, introducing more than 1,200 product features – 80 percent of which are sourced from our customers. This, among other reasons, is why Gartner’s latest Magic Quadrant just ranked Oracle better than all competitors when it comes to “completeness of vision” and very high when it comes to value delivered – the two areas that matter most in HCM.  

While competitors are dealing with the broken promises spoken about in the same report, we continue to drive more value. A customer once told me that when we help a business transform to the cloud, they are giving us the tools to their kingdom. It’s a tremendous responsibility and one we take seriously. This is why I love what I do and why Oracle will continue to lead the way as we invest heavily in our cloud offerings, spending almost $7B in R&D annually, and living every day to deliver on our promises.