Your Cloud Transformation Journey into the Business of Tomorrow

All the highlights, key insights and findings from Modern Business Experience 2018

Welcome to Your Tomorrow, Today

The challenges of change and disruption have become a norm for many businesses today. Just keeping up with what is happening in the market isn’t enough for survival. New competition, the shifting dynamics of a digital market, higher customer expectations and technology innovations are driving the pace and scale of change to unprecedented levels.

Many business leaders who I meet also see opportunities in change and are actively looking for growth and new markets. They want to understand how moving business applications and processes to the cloud can not only increase efficiency, but bring them greater agility and speed to evolve their businesses.

‘Accelerating Your Business in a Competitive World’ contains contributions from thought leaders, stories from businesses already reaping the benefits from their own transformation, and the latest global insights from Oracle. Whether your role is in customer experience, finance, supply chain, human resources or technology, you’ll find many key insights here to help you create your tomorrow, today.

Amanda Jobbins
Best wishes, Amanda Jobbins VP Demand Generation and Marketing - EMEA/APAC, Oracle
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Thought Leadership

Industry Talking Points

Technology continues to transform the way that businesses operate, both in terms of internal process and the way in which they connect with and serve their customers. Innovations around AI, machine learning, automation and Cloud Computing—to name but a few—are bringing what was once thought of as science fiction to the fore as the essential foundations for tomorrow's forward-thinking businesses.

And there's no sign of technological innovation slowing down. So, if your business isn't innovating, it's stagnating. Constellation Research Founder and Chairman, Ray Wang, offers a sobering statistic for those content to rest on their laurels:

52%
of 2000's Fortune 500 firms are now gone

So How do You Innovate Through Technology?

The answer lies in how businesses can bring together all the different elements of their operations, making use of technologies such as AI and automation—to 'augment humanity', as Wang puts it—empowering humans to making better decisions and ultimately be more creative and engaged. Underpinning all this needs to be a digital strategy that takes advantage of the power, accessibility, intelligence, autonomy and capability of the cloud.

Of the 7.5bn people in the world

5bn Are of working age
3.5bn Want to work
1.3bn Have jobs
Only 13% Are engaged in what they do

How can we encourage more innovation to change this?

Deloitte Head of Digital Strategy Consulting, Matthew Guest, believes that there needs to be a fundamental shift in how businesses plan for tomorrow and plan for today:

Matthew Guest
"We need to abandon the 3 to 5-year plan. The two time-horizons you need to worry about are 10 years and 6 months."

And it all starts with the people within your organisation. “Empowerment enables innovation,” he adds, “if every decision you make today was automated, what would you do with your time?”

Customer Experience

Creating the Connected Customer Experience of Tomorrow, Today

Consumer expectations have skyrocketed in tandem with technological innovation. Businesses are expected to know what, how, when and why to engage with them. Organisations need data that is secure, trusted and highly available; operating models that can decipher this data on the web-scale; and sufficient processing power to execute this at the pace required to satisfy the demands of the modern customer.

Humans can only do a certain amount without the support of technology, and the opportunity to capitalise on AI has never been greater. As Ray Wang has said, one of the key roles of AI will be “augmenting humans to make better decisions”.

"We built training programmes and proper digital marketing tracks to upskill the workers, and upskill the shared service centre capability, which we would then offer to smaller markets.”

Catherine Walker
Global Head of Digital Marketing and Operations, Vodafone

Creating tomorrow's customer experience needs to be an inclusive activity. Understanding the needs of other parts of the business and the different technologies they may be using or looking to adopt is an important consideration. Oracle President of Product Development Thomas Kurian provided an overview of many new CX innovations now entering the market, while CAA Global CEO Anne Marie Forsyth discussed the importance of including stakeholders from across the business when devising a new strategy for customer experience:

The technologies that can help drive better CX
Driving business transformation with Oracle Cloud
55%
of consumers would pay more for a better customer experience.1
1 Defaqto Research
72%
of businesses say that improving the customer experience is their top priority.2
2 Forrester
62%
of companies view customer experience delivered by the contact centers as a competitive differentiator.3
3 Deloitte
Your journey to creating tomorrow's customer experience starts today with the Oracle Cloud.
Finance and Supply Chain

Connecting Your Finance and Supply Chain to the Rest of Your Business

One of the biggest opportunities for innovation through technology is the way that it can connect otherwise siloed parts of an organisation. Transforming finance and supply chain from a back-office function into an entity that can share data and insights with the rest of the company will offer greater agility in a digital world and help businesses to create their tomorrow today.

This is a view strongly supported by KPMG Director of Strategic Alliances, Fiona Martin, who underlines the importance of embracing the technological change to really deliver value and assist other areas of the business.

“The trends we're seeing in finance are really built around how technology is a disruptor. It's giving organisations an opportunity to move from being a backwards looking finance operation reporting for their corporations to forward looking—really thinking about how they can provide new data, new insights for the future."

Fiona Martin
Director of Strategic Alliances Team, KPMG

How technology turns finance into a forward-looking function
Drive business outcomes with speed and insight

By moving to the cloud, businesses can harness the power of connected applications and business functions to form a single end-to-end system. For example, the ledger can be taken from being purely a consolidation system for transactions, into being the system of truth for operating and financially reporting on your organisation. This provides controllers and CFOs with a much more accurate view of the financial position day to day, hour to hour, and enables companies to do something new with ERP.

A wealth of new finance and supply chain apps optimised for the cloud and tailored for different industries allow organisations to easily integrate technologies such as IOT, automation and AI to achieve a more profitable and forward-looking operation that will have positive impacts all over the business.

65%
of CEOs see disruption as an opportunity.
67%
of CEOs believe they need to disrupt their organisations.
25%
of CEOs have appointed Chief Digital Officers.
Source: KPMG’s CEO Outlook survey 2017
Your journey to creating tomorrow's finance and supply chain starts today with the Oracle Cloud.
Human Resources

How Human Resources can Support Your Digital Strategy

In the face of technologies that can automate many of the tasks and functions that are currently carried out by employees, human resources must address the challenge of managing the concerns and expectations of the workforce, while also seizing the opportunities made available by continued innovation.

AI and job-automation can be anxiety-inducing for many, but instead of viewing technology as a threat, it should be instead embraced as an enabler. Deloitte’s Head of Digital Strategy Consulting, Matthew Guest, recently posed the question:

"If every decision you make today was automated, if you didn't have to do anything, what would you do with your time?”

Matthew Guest
Head of Digital Strategy Consulting, Deloitte

Cathy Brown, company secretary at Engage, is optimistic about how technology can fundamentally improve our working lives, but reminds us of the importance of including employees in your digital strategy:

How do you make people feel engaged while at work?
Unleash the power of people: From humans to chatbots to AI
"They need to clearly understand what we're doing with the digital strategy, they need to have a say on how it operates within the organisation and what it's for, because otherwise people won't engage with it.”

Cathy Brown
Company Secretary, Engage

In practical terms for businesses seeking to innovate today to move into tomorrow, a shift in thinking is required. Instead of looking at HR as being for the HR organisation exclusively, it should be used as a vehicle to engage employees and managers, developing them by building a culture of learning and growth within the organisation.

To deliver tomorrow’s HR function today, the key is to make it self-service—providing all the relevant information to the employee and the manager, right when they need it, all the time.

5%
Today, less than 5% of jobs can be fully automated.
60%
60% of jobs can be at least 30% automated.
50%
By 2040, we can expect 50% of today's work activities to be fully automated.
Source: Matthew Guest Keynote
Your journey to creating tomorrow's human resources starts today with the Oracle Cloud.
Technology Leadership

The Tech That Will Transform Your Future Business

Any organisation seeking to embark upon a cloud journey in order to create their tomorrow today, needs to be clear about the role played by IT. No longer just the support team to make sure that everyone's email is working correctly, IT and tech leadership have a hugely important function in the context of the wider organisation.

Data is the new oil. How you use it is what's going to differentiate you and allow you to be competitive.

As other parts of your business transform, new technologies and working methodologies will give rise to additional data sources and dependencies, which in turn present new opportunities. The task of IT is to harness this influx of data by making use of the likes of AI and machine learning to deliver new insights and data driven innovation.

Making sense of all the information around you puts your organisation in the best position to respond with agility and remain competitive. For Martin Drake, director at Drive Software Solutions, technological innovation presented an opportunity to fundamentally change how they operated, and address new markets:

"We've now evolved our business to deliver a SaaS fleet management system, exploiting that technology but marketed to SMEs, and that’s caused significant change in the way we go to market, the way we develop, and the way we respond to customers.”

Martin Drake
Director, Drive Software Solutions

The technology to keep up with and enable rapid change
What Do Data-Driven Innovators do that Others Can’t?

Remaining compliant while offering every corner of the business the information, tools and capabilities to execute their functions—all in the face of increasingly challenging budgets—is another challenge.

The autonomous platform from Oracle allows business to use the technology without having to manually operate it. There’s no need to configure the database, patch it, upgrade it, tune it, back it up, encrypt it, or enable disaster recovery.

Your journey to creating tomorrow's technology leadership starts today with the Oracle Cloud.
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