Oracle Moving Finance and HR to the Cloud
Forward-looking organizations understand that their survival depends not merely on digital transformation, but on a dramatic cultural shift as well. By initiating their migration to the cloud with Finance and HR, companies can leverage their two most powerful assets—people and money—to reap immediate savings and efficiencies as well as gain long-term strategic advantage, tipping the balance between success and failure for their cloud initiatives.
Together, Finance and HR make an ideal first step in moving toward a holistic fully integrated cloud solution. After all, no two back-office functional areas are as interdependent.
At the same time, however, Finance and HR have traditionally been walled off from one another thanks to the outdated assumption that HR is merely a support function that relies on “soft” metrics while Finance drives strategy based on hard numbers. In addition, Finance has traditionally seen people as a cost, while HR viewed them as an asset. Yet the benefits of increased connectivity are obvious, and include:
Greater security and more consistent data governance
Shared workflow and business processes
Integrated reporting to provide deeper analytics
Common self-service access and shared data-entry points
What’s more, HR’s people focus drives the cultural change necessary for cloud migration that will carry through the organization’s’ complete digital transformation and beyond.
1 Finance and HR: The Cloud’s New Power Partnership, MIT Technology Review Custom in collaboration with Oracle Corporation, 2017. All data provided in this ebook come from this source unless otherwise noted.
The most successful companies today are those able to adapt quickly to customer needs and expectations. These organizations optimize the customer journey by eliminating internal barriers wherever possible. Migrating your data and processes to a fully integrated, end-to-end cloud system can make this happen.
Take the time to choose a best-in-class single-vendor solution to maximize data sharing and analytics capabilities as well as ease transition and implementation. Choosing a single vendor virtually eliminates one of the most significant hurdles to cloud migration: integrating multiple apps.
Watch Oracle’s Chris Kite explain what happens when Finance and HR collaborate.
Organizational change cannot succeed unless stakeholders themselves are willing to change ingrained habits and assumptions. We’ve seen the organizational benefits of cloud migration above, but it’s important to note that front-line employees in Finance, IT, and especially HR accrue numerous benefits that are not immediately obvious. These include:
Automation of routine tasks
Easier communication through data sharing
Self-service capabilities resulting in reduced reliance on IT
More time for strategic thinking
Stakeholder resistance is an ongoing and significant challenge for those implementing organizational change. In addition to helping stakeholders understand what’s in it for them, change leaders must challenge the common misconceptions that digital transformation is difficult, slow, or expensive. Here is where the cloud truly shines, as companies discover that their migrations not only meet but exceed expectations in several dimensions:
of IT respondents say the timeframe was better than they expected.
of Finance and HR functions say the timeframe was better than they expected. An additional 39% judged it as in-line.
Even if line-of-business leaders increasingly control budgets and drive their team’s cloud transformation, data migration remains an IT project at its core. Getting buy-in from IT leaders and collaborating well is therefore critical to success. Among Finance and HR executives, 43 percent identified close collaboration with IT as a critical success factor, as did 49 percent of others.
One potential hurdle is that IT teams can be reluctant to support and assist with the transition if they see cloud migration as a threat to their traditional standing. It’s important to stress that this is far from the case. Certainly, relocating data assets to the cloud will reduce the need for maintenance, assistance, and upkeep. But it will also free up IT to take on a more strategic and innovative role, transforming Information Technology from a cost center into a driver of growth and revenue.
Before AFG, Australia’s largest mortgage broker and one of the country’s leading financial services companies, migrated to the Oracle ERP Cloud, 80 percent of its IT budget was consumed by operational activities. Once the company’s digital transformation was complete, however, AFG could allocate 60 percent of that budget to innovation.
With Oracle ERP Cloud
60% of IT budget dedicated to innovation
Without Oracle ERP Cloud
80% of IT budget dedicated to operations
Digital transformation offers a tremendous opportunity for organizations to up their strategic game. Not only does it provide deeper analytical insights thanks to data sharing and integrated reporting, it also permits the automation of numerous mundane tasks and makes others far less time-consuming.
As a happy consequence, HR, Finance, and IT teams must be refocused to engage more strategically. Skills that typically require development include:
Time managementActive learning capabilitiesProblem solvingMathematical reasoningAnalytics skillsCommercial awareness Business acumenMIT Technology Review Custom and Oracle’s research strongly indicates that organizations in the process of digital transformation see the value of investing in these new skills. For example, 40 percent plan to build their team’s data science and statistical analysis expertise, while 43 percent plan to bring IT people into Finance and HR to help employees take advantage of new technologies.
Like any broad organizational change, digital transformation requires careful management to succeed. Commencing your company’s cloud migration with Finance and HR is the best route to overall success. Not only are these two functions intimately intertwined, but HR can also lend its people-centric expertise to creating the cultural shift necessary for success. In addition, change leaders must communicate how the transformation will benefit not just the organization as a whole, but each individual stakeholder as well. Finally, the company must develop a broader skill set as employees are relieved of mundane administrative tasks and take on new strategically aligned roles.
