Listening To Customers

The Oracle HCM Cloud team hosted their annual Customer Advisory Board meetings at Oracle HQ last week.  I've always enjoyed the CAB meetings because it's the one event where we reverse the flow of information:  customers tell us about how they use our products rather than us showing customers how to use those products.  I learned a few lessons in listening to our customers last week.

Customers today are more concerned with the pragmatic aspects of AI

To be honest, I went to the CAB meetings prepared to talk about the innovative projects happening around AI:  quantum computing, artificial decision-making, responsive vs structured chatbots.  But our customers wanted to talk about the pragmatic aspects of AI, especially robotic process automation.  I ended the week feeling that I'd been prepared to talk about running while our customers are still focused on learning to walk.

Innovation is cool, but customers want to know more about optimizing what they have now

Surprisingly, most of my one-to-one conversations with customers were not about upcoming new features.  Instead, the dominant theme was about their hunger to better use the features they already have in hand.  "How can I make better use of..." or "How can I meet the challenge of... when I get back to the office on Monday."

Mobile - Finally!

You've heard the message for years:  "If you ain't got mobile, you ain't got nothing."  2019 is the year that our Oracle HCM Cloud customers are moving out on that idea.  About 20 percent of the customers attending the CAB meetings had gone mobile with their self-service HCM apps in the prior six months.  Everyone else... and I do mean everyone else... is planning to go mobile in 2019.  So the party has been a little slow in getting started, but it's really catching fire now.  Different approaches to the self-service mobile user experience was a hot topic.

Functional regression testing has become a bottleneck

Now that continuous service delivery is a reality, functional regression testing has become a bottleneck.  The classic approach of fully manual, end-to-end functional regression testing simply does not meet the schedule requirements of a continuous service delivery model - just not enough time.  Customers had serious energy around regression testing strategies as well as automated testing tools - they're compelled to change and are still figuring out just how to change.  Interesting side note - we also heard some overlap here with the interest in robotic process automation.

So those were the customer messages I took away from the CAB meetings.  I'll wager others heard different things, but this is what I got out of the meetings.  So now I've got some new ideas regarding my own work agenda for 2019 - how can I help in some small way to bring direction and clarity by responding to what I heard?  Stay tuned for more.