Manage Oracle quarterly updates with just-in-time guides

A key benefit of moving to SaaS is the continuous innovation available for your organization, helping you gain value from your investment through faster delivery of new enhancements and features at a lower maintenance cost. Oracle SaaS has a quarterly release cycle, delivering hundreds of enhancements, features and fixes to help strengthen your experience.

Oracle has great services and people to help you manage this transition every quarter, such as our Application Customer Success experts who provide Regression Testing services and support the roll out and adoption of new features while ensuring the stability of your environment. Oracle also provides in-application guidance through Oracle Guided Learning, to help you communicate these changes to your end users with ease.

Why do I need to communicate change? And why in-application?

Communication is a critical component in any change management initiative whether periodic or infrequent. We can never take for granted nor assume the way a user digests information at the constant pace to which it is being delivered and in the context in how they receive it. In a recent study of Oracle customers conducted by IDC, we found that 80% of errors reported to the application help desk, were primarily caused from user error.

Imagine yourself having already significantly invested in time training your end users to be met with a new craft of changes that could impact business performance and user satisfaction. In addition, think about the incremental amount of service time you as the administrator and your various support teams need to scale up in answering end user questions and/or creating content to service these changes. All while having to support and organize the tactical activities within the application.

Email systems and other forms of communications can help to deliver the message. But we’re finding that using in-application techniques dramatically improves cut-through, responsiveness, and action verse using exterior methods exclusively. The IDC study participants noted:

• “Oracle Guided Learning made it easier to roll out application system updates to large numbers of users"
• “Average employee efficiency related to completing application updates increased 39% after adoption. This resulted in an average annual productivity-based business value of $285,800 for each organization studied.”
• “Oracle Guided Learning reduced service desk enquiries by an average of 63%... as a participant noted, OGL also reduced help desk demands by empowering end users to solve issues on a more real-time and situational basis.”

What is Oracle Guided Learning and how does it help you communicate periodic changes such as quarterly updates?

Oracle Guided Learning (OGL) is Oracle’s digital adoption platform, providing in-application guidance for end users, resulting in a faster adoption of cloud services and processes and a more efficient means to manage continuous business and product (whether it be periodic or infrequent) change.

You can use Oracle Guided Learning to:     

• Communicate the availability of new features and enhancements to business users
• Communicate downtime and maintenance windows to users in the flow of work, created in minutes
• Leverage best practice adoption use cases in communicating process change and adoption
• Use pre-built process guides to save time creating general process/feature changes
• Arm yourself with troubleshooting content from My Oracle Support

Here's how a large higher education institution used OGL to streamline their Oracle quarterly updates: 

 A quarterly alert message will be activated within their Oracle Cloud Fusion application a week prior to their quarterly update. The guide will be set to pop up for users when they enter the application. It alerts the users of the upcoming quarterly upgrade, and tells them when the application will be down for the update. Once the upgrade is complete, the guide’s activation conditions will automatically stop presenting the guide as the time conditions have expired. 

Digital adoption now included in Cloud Fusion Apps

As of October 2022, Oracle announced that their existing customers using core SaaS (ERP, HCM, CX, Procurement Cloud) can activate and leverage Oracle Guided Learning as part of their desired application.

Eligible customers gain access to Oracle’s in-application guidance tools, to use and deploy up to 15 guides to help communicate these changes across the application interface and measure change and asset effectiveness with analytics. Our Premium solution also provides value to customers seeking additional support offering a library of pre-built process guides and unlimited deployment across multiple applications, multiple languages.

You can start using Oracle Guided Learning today. Simply ask your Change Lead, Oracle administrator and/or business owner to request for your account by heading to our website today. If in doubt, please contact your Oracle CSM for help.

To find out more about the value customers gained from OGL you can download a copy of the IDC Report, free of charge.