Oracle Financials Strategy

Last week I was sitting outside, enjoying the sunshine and having lunch with friends after a three hour morning meeting. We began to talk about our careers – where we’d been and what we’d done. My friend, an excellent student and trained public accounting guru, shared about why she’d left the Finance team and moved into Development.

“We worked such incredibly long hours, often through the night, to close the books for quarterly earnings. Sometimes I’d sleep under my desk so I could be available to work on my reconciliations and cost center allocations once the numbers were ready.” She explained that the period close process is a chain of events with different teams of people involved at different points in the chain, so sometimes “I’d wait around for hours for my turn, unsure of when I might be able to start my close activities.”

As I listened I was reminded of several articles that I’d recently read about improved productivity and retention that Best Buy experienced by implementing a radical new approach to work – Results Only Work Environments (ROWE).

According to Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson, the founders of this new movement and authors of the book, Why Works Sucks and How to Fix It, ROWE is not a modified work schedule, it’s not flex-time, shortened work weeks or any of the myriad of attempts to provide employees more work-life balance. “In a Results Only Work Environment (ROWE), people get to do whatever they want, whenever they want as long as the work gets done. “ Sounds too good to be true I thought, but does it work?

“Right now, there are two authentic ROWEs: Fortune 100 retailer Best Buy Co., Inc. and brokerage firm J.A. Counter & Associates in New Richmond, WI. Both firms have embraced technology in ways that allow them to maximize productivity (up an average of 41% on Best Buy teams) while also giving people control over their lives.”

What a concept! It sounded reasonable for groups like Sales or even Marketing to implement an innovative workplace program like ROWE, but would it work for groups like Finance? Would it be possible for employees completing back-office functions to close their books in 3-5 days and still “have control over their lives”?

While most of us in technology companies have enjoyed the freedom and flexibility to work more effectively, I wondered if my peers in Finance enjoyed the same autonomy. Is it reasonable to suggest that reconciliations and allocations can be completed as easily at home in the evening rather than staying at work for hours on end, waiting for other groups to complete their subledger updates and post them to the General Ledger? I believe it is. Best Buy not only clearly demonstrated that ROWE works but has defined key performance indicators to measure these improvements.

“Thanks to ROWE, people at Best Buy are happier with their lives and their work”, according to Ressler and Thompson. “The company has benefited too, with increases in productivity averaging 35 percent and sharp decreases in voluntary turnover rates, as much as 90 percent in some divisions”.

Was the technology, collaboration tools and software applications used by Best Buy to define, measure and achieve these improvements as well as enable employees to “have control over their lives” a part of their success? Did the Oracle implementation facilitate ROWE being successful in departments that never would have thought it possible in the past?

With technology now in place to free people from the cube, Ressler and Thompson are on a mission to make ROWE the new status quo.

“Fortunately we live in a time when this is possible. Today technology gives people incredible power over time and information. In our personal lives, technology means we don’t have to wait for the store to open to buy something. We don’t have to watch our favorite show the minute it airs or come down from Mount Everest to make a phone call. But this isn’t about the wonders of technology. This is about what technology could let us do and how we’re not taking full advantage.”

So why don’t we take full advantage of what technology could let us do?

According to a recent study by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson published in Harvard Business Review, “it’s not easy for most companies to deploy enterprise IT successfully. The technologies themselves are complicated to configure and test, and changing people’s behavior and attitudes toward technology is even more challenging." While major ERP players continue to deliver complete solutions that streamline configuration, testing and deployment, it’s not the full answer to the riddle.

Another factor that impacts our adoption of technology are newly emerging trends in the competitive landscape. McAfee and Brynjolfsson's analysis showed that “competition is accelerating within traditional industries within the broader U.S. economy. Not because more products are becoming digital but because more processes are”. As processes become more digital and emerging technologies enable employees to work more effectively, we can expect that “the firm with the best processes will win in most or all markets.”

What do you see as the barriers or enablers to a Results Only Work Environment (ROWE)?