Reflections from CloudWorld 2023 - Busting myths about training and change management

I was fortunate enough to attend Oracle CloudWorld 2023 and am still processing the majesty of the event – from inspiring keynotes, insightful presentations and informative discussions with customers and partners – across the span of four meaningful days.

In Safra Catz’s keynote, “Putting customer success at the heart of everything”, we heard from our customers and their courage to embrace change during transformation. Many of our customers shared how they were prepared to take significant risks to revolutionize their business and the assurance and satisfaction from the proactive partnerships and solutions provided by Oracle and our implementation partners. Within those implementations, customers succeed when their business realizes value from increased productivity, lower costs, faster speed to market and enhanced stakeholder satisfaction. It is no secret that many of these organizations embrace the secret sauce, which is adequate attention, planning and resource allocation for user adoption.

I’m a Product Manager for Oracle Guided Learning (OGL), which is part of Oracle Customer Success Services. We help customers and partners be confident in the cloud by providing training, change communications and content to employees in-application. Customers who use our solution often find they accelerate their user adoption, increase their change and training productivity and reduce subsequent user errors, service requests and time spent on data validation.

Our team had the privilege of speaking to many customers, partners and Oracle employees during the conference and found there were several interesting questions and perceptions about user adoption, change management and training. Here are five myths busted on training and change management with Oracle Guided Learning:

Myth 1: Everyone learns new things in the same way.

Actually, no-one thinks like this. But why when it comes to significant software implementations do we follow the same playbook? We spend huge resources (time, money, effort) curating various learning paths, documentation, training videos and when it’s time to execute, deliver training via ‘train the trainer events and long self-paced webinars.
Guided Learning provides you with the ability to provide system, process, and policy training via various mechanisms. You can provide:

• Navigational, in-context guidance and tours for employees who prefer ‘learning by doing’.
• Step by Step, ‘Job Aids’ for every process for employees who prefer ‘learning by reading’.
• Video tutorials for employees who prefer ‘learning by viewing’.
• Consolidated training and helps links available on every screen via our Help Panel.

These can augment your traditional training methods to provide the learning your employees prefer and lead to faster adoption.

Myth 2: Learning is a one-time activity done around Go-Live.

Again, many L&D professionals don’t believe this but are heavily constrained by resources allocated for the project. One-time training helps to create focus and attention, but the simple reality is people are naturally forgetful. When changes occur (in Oracle’s case, quarterly), adaptations and revisions need to be made. Guided Learning helps you scale your training across your cloud lifecycle by:

• Providing in process, field level guidance for policy, process changes, helping the user advance to the next step.
• New content that evolves with every Oracle Fusion release, allowing you to deploy and guidance around new features, processes, configure this to your setup and communicate this to various roles in minutes in-application.

This can help you build a sustainable, scalable model for training at any stage of your cloud journey.

Myth 3: I still get lots of user errors even when I turn on in-app guidance tools

So, you’ve done the training, provided the guidance via traditional and in-app methods and you’re still getting issues from your users and spending lots of time on data validation.

Guided Learning not only provides you with the ability to place contextual guidance at a field level, but also gives you the ability to prevent users from advancing onto the next step if they have inputted the incorrect desired field.

This helps users input the correct fields in, allows administrators to spend less or no time validating the information entered and saves subsequent user related service tickets.

Myth 4: So, using Digital Adoption in-app tactics are cool, but I still have to create all my content which is time consuming.

Well with Guided Learning you don’t. Other Digital Adoption vendors will provide you with the functionality and technology, but we take it the next level by also providing you with Libraries – containing more than 2,000 pre-configured guides you can deploy of the box and/or apply edits and configurations to meet your need. We also provide Automated Machine Translation, allowing you to convert content into your language of choice* (based off OCI’s Machine Translation service) in minutes.

This helps you simplify and reduce your content creation process and deploy expert driven guidance in a short timeframe.

Myth 5: I heard Oracle Guided Learning is only used for Oracle Fusion Cloud Apps.

Guided Learning can be deployed across any application – (Oracle Industry, On-Premise, Cloud App and Custom/Third-Party App). In fact, we have over 70+ applications/modules that OGL can be deployed on today and are continuing to test and evaluate more.

In October 2022, we announced the General Availability of Oracle Guided Learning Included for Fusion Cloud (ERP, Procurement, Supply Chain Planning, CX Sales & Marketing). Customers would receive a free OGL Subscription and be able to start using this functionality across 15 assets (process guides, smart-tips, messages etc.). This solution is perfect for customers looking to employ adoption tactics across one change and/or module process.

We have Oracle Guided Learning Premium – that allows you to extend our solution across your entire application stack, with unlimited use of assets, access to our entire library of content and advanced adoption features like machine translation and surveys. Guided Learning Premium helps customers with big-bang, multi-application transformation and to unify the adoption and help experience across all applications.

Customers today utilize OGL for adoption across Oracle Fusion (ERP, HCM, CX, SCM), Oracle Cloud Apps like EPM, CPQ, Oracle Industry Clouds, Oracle NetSuite, Oracle On-premise apps like PeopleSoft and JD Edwards and Custom/Third-party apps like Salesforce, Service Now & Kronos.

Simply reach out to your Oracle Customer Success Services Manager, and we can start the process of scoping your various adoption needs across your application of choice.

Should you have any questions or comments, please connect with our team or myself directly.

For more information you can visit our website, and/or speak with your Oracle Customer Success Services manager.