As part of the Quest Forum Digital Event: Innovation Week, Chris Leone, Senior Vice President of Applications Development at Oracle, and Gretchen Alarcon, Vice President of Product Strategy at Oracle, spoke about recent Oracle HCM Cloud innovations.

There is a certain amount of balance necessary as you aim to future-proof your business while also meeting user needs today. Leone embraces that balance. He presented an explanation of the newest capabilities of HCM Cloud to give you the best steps to take for now and the days to come. According to Leone, tomorrow’s predictions are today’s HR reality. The first investment by Oracle for both today and tomorrow is Artificial Intelligence.

Important HR Information Regarding COVID-19

Before diving into the recent HCM Cloud innovations, Leone and Alarcon presented timely information regarding COVID-19 for HR at no charge.

HR is extremely important as the world responds to COVID-19 in operational efficiency, wellness, benefits, agile teams, workforce decisions, payroll changes, and learning opportunities. Unprecedented times require partnership and meaningful assistance. With that said, Oracle and partners are proactively providing COVID-19 related support. HCM Cloud is offering Core HR customers no-cost access to Workforce Health & Safety. Oracle is also creating Friday office hours for WH&S deployment support. Additionally, Northpoint, CastleBridge, Evosys, Inoapps have all signed up to assist customers to quickly deploy this solution in their environments.

For more information on these support resources, go to https://www.oracle.com/corporate/covid-19.html.

Additionally, several questions have been coming in regarding social security payments, time-tracking, reports, and more. The answers to these questions are available at the Cloud Customer Connect site in a COVID-19-specific forum.

Artificial Intelligence in HCM Cloud

AI is reframing the employee experience. Roughly 50 percent of workers currently use some form of AI at work, compared to 32 percent last year. In addition, 65 percent of workers are optimistic, excited, and grateful for having robot co-workers.

In the past, pre-configured recommendations were offered by Oracle. Unfortunately, they became stale over time without the necessary system configuration. With AI Machine Learning, processes learn from personal patterns to improve the relevance of interactions. Oracle is transitioning to leverage these technologies that learn, based on the behaviors of individuals or roles. The results are better recommendations for automation, task completion, and reminders of tasks that fly under the radar.

Oracle delivers AI-augmented business processes and recommended actions across the HCM Cloud:

• Talent Acquisition
• Risk Cloud
• Learning
• Talent Management
• Skills Inventory
• Dynamic UI with suggested actions
  • Predictions of what you want to do, know, or input at any given time as it learns who you are, what you and other users like you have done in the past

The image below shows a set of personalized suggestions and the reason each one appears to the user.

In the area of AI, Oracle HCM Cloud is moving from a hard-coded configured recommendation set of engines to learning-based AI capabilities in which models learn over time, based on interactions with the system. This will allow you to make better, faster decisions for your organization. Thus, technology improves the overall user experience.

Service Delivery in Oracle HCM Cloud

Another point of discussion is that of the experience economy placing importance on service delivery. In the consumer world, we are accustomed to Google searching information easily. We don’t have to search around or call people for information. Oracle HCM Cloud is bringing this same type of experience to the enterprise. The solution is to personalize interactions to connect with the users however they want to connect— browser, mobile, DA, SMS. It utilizes the medium that makes the most sense for the user. Investments to improve service delivery for all users include:

• HR Help Desk
• Career sites for all candidates
• Digital Assistant (most popular)
• Mobile responsive design
• Guided Learning
• AI-enabled recommendations

New and more relevant content is available via the digital assistant. The images below display some of the available functionality.

In the self-service experience, the digital assistant is just one medium for receiving the information you seek. It’s also available in SLACK, Teams, and more. Additionally, this information can be further personalized. Hilton, for example, has changed Feedback in the example above, to Give a High Five. They have also personalized the sign-off message of the DA to a saying that their founder used regarding service delivery.

Oracle HCM Cloud is trying to lower the cost of service delivery by pushing information further and further to the edge— directly to the end user if possible. This will keep the user from needing to call a help desk. Top questions that are asked can be answered with service delivery. Overall values include quicker time to resolution, compliance consistency, shortened time to fill, hire, and onboard, lower cost of time and effort to HR, and alignment of HR processes with business needs.

Talent Supply & Demand

Leading companies are re-emphasizing talent supply and demand. Oracle wants to help organizations meet the demand they have for certain skills while also helping employees grow and stay with the company because they see value in advancing their career. Oracle aims to build a culture of curiosity and exploration to identify and grow “Next Best Candidates.” They have invested in the following areas to better manage the supply and demand balance:

• Strategic Workforce Planning
• Workforce Modeling
• Social Learning
• Candidate Relationship Management
• Career Mobility

Oracle HCM Cloud’s brand new Opportunity Marketplace will drive better internal mobility to help grow the skills and talent of your workplace, while also optimizing the talent you already have and bring the best candidates to the problems you need solved today. It allows you to search for jobs (traditionally new assignments) and sign up for gigs (short-term, temporary assignments). From an employer perspective, you can solve talent shortages by bringing people to the problem as they consider taking on gigs.

Re-emphasizing talent supply and demand increases talent utilization. It improves employee satisfaction and retention and enhances the quality of the talent pool. Opportunity Marketplace also aligns predicted needs with development actions and creates a culture of curiosity and exploration.

Compliance & Data Stewardship

Compliance and data stewardship needs are resurgent. The solution by Oracle HCM Cloud is an automated, intelligent simplification of complex processes. This entails automating multiple steps to ensure the completion of each one, resulting in improved data quality. At the moment, Oracle HCM Cloud aligns your best practices with complex processes with the following tools:

• Advanced Controls for HCM to identify risks
• Workforce Health and Safety Incidents
• Data ownership, management, and privacy (GDPR, HIPPA, CCPA, etc.)
• Delivered HR statutory alignment
• Represented worker agreements

As mentioned at the beginning of this post, Customer Cloud Connect provides a Customer Connect Forum focused on COVID-19 related HR challenges and best practices. You can also find Workforce Health and Safety Incidents on Customer Cloud Connect at no charge.

The system will ask the user what type of incident was experienced (Internally, you can customize these options to include COVID-19). The user will also input incident details with comments and attachments before submitting the report. The incident report goes to a central repository where incident owners (HR, auditors, safety officers, etc.) can track the incident to resolution.

Employee Health and Safety is free for the next year for HCM Cloud customers.

In Experience Design Studio, HR Business people can configure the system for compliance purposes. It is easy to use. You can also change any pre-delivered statutory rules. To add on top of the delivered rules, make a rule inactive. Copy it over and edit the delivered rule. The localization has been updated to individual needs.

The value of these features is that they include the consistent application of business processes, automation ensuring appropriate stewardship, speedy completion and accuracy of transactions, and greater efficiency of HR time and effort.

IT Simplification

Another area of focus, IT simplification, brings alignment of processes. Data quality suffers when appropriate processes are not followed. At its core, bad data leads to bad results. Therefore, the solution is an automation and AI-enabled process to simplify the maintenance process. You can leverage self-learning processes to limit the need to manage static processes. The features to achieve this include:

• Delivered HR statutory requirements
• ADP Payroll integration simplification and automation
• Experience Design Studio supports business rules and company practices

The defaulting and validation rules become more and more complex. Some of the rules available are in the image below:

There is great value in IT Simplification as it creates consistency for compliance sake. It also aids employees in quicker transaction completion, saves HR time and effort, and ensures data quality. Aligning HR processes with business needs benefits everyone.

HCM Cloud for Mobile Workers

Most customers have moved to the new mobile responsive user experience of HCM Cloud for Mobile Workers. The capabilities speak for themselves. Make sure you are taking advantage of the #1 most usable app in HCM.

Key Takeaway

Embracing change and automation is inevitable. By 2025, machines will perform double the amount of work as humans, and AI-enabled processes will create thousands of new roles, including many jobs that haven’t been invented yet. Intelligent HCM solutions enable customers to effectively transition into this world of accelerating change. Leverage the Oracle HCM Cloud to reach user needs both today and tomorrow.