Preparing for Oracle HCM Cloud Release 10

Just a short post today.  We are preparing for Oracle HCM Cloud Release 10.  We are part of the 'Early Upgrade' programme (EU) and our environment will be upgraded today.

In later posts I will be exploring the new functionality in this release.  In the meantime, we are looking forward to some of the major enhancements:

User Experience

Much more functionality for Employees and Managers will begin and end in the Simplified User Interface (SUI).  This will be a great improvement in the User Experience (UX).

Goal Management and Performance Management

The goal management and performance management workareas will be moved to the SUI (at least for employees and managers).

Simplified Role Model

The role based access in HCM Cloud has always been a powerful and complex structure.   This has led to several areas of duplication of roles.  For example, Role 1 may inherit role 2 and Role 3 may also inherit Role 2.  To remove all the functional security of role 2 it must be removed from both parent roles.   In the new 'rationalised' role structure, many of these problems have been removed and/or simplified.

So, when the environment is returned, I'll be posting more detailed comments on the new functionality with the benefit of being able to actually use it!

Oracle HCM World 2015

Last week I attended the Oracle HCM World conference at the Gaylord National Convention Center in Washington DC.  Here are a few of my thoughts and observations on the event.

Cloud and Social.  Those were the key messages coming out from Oracle.  Mark Hurd gave a keynote in which the main theme was 'embrace the Cloud'.  Almost every session I attended brough Social into the mix in some form or another.

Certus Solutions was well publicised and I was pleased to see a number of tweets about our implementation successes appear on the main screen during keynotes!

Learning

 

One of the big surprise announcements was the introduction of the new Oracle Learning module in HCM Cloud.  Learning will be very integrated with social and the demonstrations we saw were primarily based on embedding YouTube videos into the application.

 

The tag lines for Learning were "Contextual, Intelligent, Scalable, Secure".  The contextual part means that  we can embed learning materials into a process.  If, for example, you are going to perform the annual compensation review but there is some mandatory training you must have taken before you are allowed to change salaries or give bonuses, then Oracle Learning will intercept your transaction and ensure you do complete the training before continuing with the transaction.

You can also showcase learning based on factors that are relevant ot the user.  This is the "Intelligence" part.  There is an algorithm based on over 100 objects in the system and the algorithm identifies what is most relevant to you and presents that learing to you.

 

 

The learning material is displayed on any device using the same UX.  Adaptive streaming is built in to regulate the display according to the optimum speed for your device and access emthod.  It will even work over 3G or 4G.

 

Managers and administrators can control what learning is available to different categories of users and many of the familiar HCM Cloud configuration techniques are used, e.g. approval management and eligibility profiles.

 

The functionality is going to be available under a controlled release in R10.

 

Watch for more developments in later releases!