HR Happy Hour 482 – How HR Technology Supports the Employee Journey

This week we were joined by HCM technology thought leader Yvette Cameron from Oracle to talk about her new role, some new developments in HCM technology from Oracle, the importance of modern and flexible solutions for HR leaders, and how HCM technology can help create better employee experiences and support employee mental health. Yvette shared some specific examples of how the employee journey can be elevated and supported with HCM technology that can meet employees where they are, and surface the tools and resources they need when they need them. Additionally, Yvette shared how the Oracle customer community is already sharing ideas and best practices with each other for better employee journeys and experiences. We also did a little bit of reminiscing on some of the legendary legacy HCM technologies like PeopleSoft and EBusiness Suite.

We also talked about having scars or broken bones as a kind of badge of honor.

This was a fun show, thanks for listening. Remember to subscribe to the HR Happy Hour Show wherever you get your podcasts.

Transcript follows:

Steve 0:00
Welcome to the HR happy hour show with Steve and Trish, Trish..So how did you get that scar of yours?

Trish 0:07
That scar of mine? I don’t know that I have scars. Do you have scars?

Steve 0:11
Just emotional ones primarily. Somebody’s got a scar of some kind no no stitches injuries no, you know, busted up an ankle somewhere. No scars?

Trish 0:26
No, I’m gonna tell you what I have. I’m a I’m more of a broken finger broken toe kind of girl. So yeah, I don’t know. I think people are either broken bone people or stitches people and I fall into the broken bone category. I’m sorry. I don’t know. Yeah, no real scars.

Steve 0:41
Good stuff. Trish it’s gonna be a fun show today. Maybe we’ll rebound from the weird question of the day. HR tech stuff with a with a friend of the show. We’ve known forever, but she’s in an exciting new role. So want to talk a little bit about that and some of the fun things that are happening there. Our guest today is Yvette Cameron. She’s the SVP of Global HCM Product Strategy at Oracle. She is also the Co-Founder and board advisory member of Velocity Career Labs, the innovative technology organization behind the velocity network Foundation, an industry consortium delivering the blockchain powered internet of careers. That’s pretty cool. Also, I like consortiums, like I’ve ever been involved in a consortium. I feel like that’s really kind of cool to be a part of that. Welcome to the show. How are you?

Yvette Cameron 1:31
I’m great. Thank you guys so much for having me here. I’m, it’s been too long since we’ve talked. So I’m excited to share this time with you today.

Trish 1:40
Yeah, good. Well, I think before we get into the meat of the show, maybe let’s talk scars, right. Do you know what?

Yvette Cameron 1:48
I am. I was hoping you would ask me that question. So Trish, I do fall in the stitches kind of scars as opposed to broken bones. I am proud that my first scar appeared at age five. When I tried to stop a door from closing in my face. That’s just who I am. Right don’t don’t block me in and had half my finger cut off in a car door. And and that set the stage for scars everywhere coming from bike accidents and ski accidents that tore the ACL and had left a scar and broken well. I actually did have a broken collarbone too. But I kind of figure you know, and nothing nothing personal. If you don’t break a bone or you don’t have a scar, you’re not pushing yourself hard enough. That’s my that’s my motto. So I encourage my children and my myself to have scars to demonstrate our are pushing for more. So there you go.

Trish 2:41
I really love that answer. See now with that kind of an answer. I love the question that way. Yeah. So that’s good. You’re right. I will say this, I think just following you for all these years. I do feel like you live life to the fullest, right? You’re at full tilt. You’re, you’re such an outdoors person, and just someone who really, truly it looks like with your family just like really is always out there enjoying kind of what the world has to offer. So that’s a good thing.

Yvette Cameron 3:08
Well, thank you. You’re right, you’re right. And I’ve and I’ve been doing it from a career perspective, too. So yeah, let me let me just jump in this. Steve, you mentioned, you know, I’m my new role. SVP at Oracle, loving it. I just joined here five months ago, in November. And I’ve got a fantastic team and a fantastic leader, Chris Leone. tremendous innovation happening. And I know we’re going to talk about kind of a new aspect on on one of our recent innovations, but it’s super exciting. And our customer momentum is fantastic. We had over over a million lives well over a million lives in the healthcare industry. Go Live at the first of January just today. I don’t know if you saw it. There was a we’ve just had a recent press release by a Kaiser you know, taking our solutions live and and I mean, just the the, again, the customer momentum and the innovation has been fantastic. And so I’m super excited to be here on top, you know, and I came here on top of a lot of really aggressive investments, right. You mentioned my work in the blockchain consortium. I like consortiums to it’s bringing competitors together to solve problems from an industry perspective, not from a vendor perspective, but how do we make the industry better? And so super excited to still be a part of that consortium and driving that forward and Oracle as a founding member of that Consortium, so yeah, I mean, just just good stuff. So I’m excited to be here.

Trish 4:36
Well, good, welcome. We are so glad you’re here too, because I mean, you’ve mentioned a couple things. First, Chris has been longtime friend of the show. And I think too, we try and share some of the things that Oracle is really up to you especially when Chris and and the team give updates. He is always so passionate. I have to say that’s probably been one of the people I’ve missed the most in this year of being kind of off the road. But whenever we just heard the recent Oracle updates and some of what you’re going to share today, his energy was just infectious, he actually can translate really well through video. So I think that’s a really special talent that he has.

Yvette Cameron 5:16
Imagine living and working with that every single day. I mean, that was not a unique that that that did that four hours of engagement or something with Chris. Every day, that high, high level of energy and passion is genuine. And it’s it’s it’s infectious. I mean, it’s, it’s, again, it’s such a delight to work in that environment. And with such a group of innovators, it’s incredible.

Trish 5:41
Well, good. Well, I definitely was an Oracle customer, most of my HR career. So that was the choices I made at the time. So that was always good to kind of see what’s going on behind the scenes. And then Steve, obviously has worked for Oracle as well. So we’ve got like deep Oracle roots here. This is a little bit of a homecoming.

Steve 5:59
Let’s do a show some day Trish on EBusiness, Suite version 10. Like, let’s let’s go through the 10.3 or 10.7, I want to I want to deep dive, I’m gonna go there. I went to oral history of ebusiness. Suite version 10. I talked for three hours.

Yvette Cameron 6:16
Well, and and I started at PeopleSoft back in the 90s. So people saw 58596. And so now, after the acquisition by Oracle, I feel like I’ve come back home, right? I was the wayward child wandering the world. And I’m back home to where I started my first job and tech was at PeopleSoft in here. Yeah, we’ll go back and forth on the PeopleSoft EBS things. Yeah, that’s good. Yeah.

Trish 6:42
For now, let’s focus, let’s focus full speed ahead. So that I know you’ve got some some great things you want to share with the audience. Lots of innovation, actually, with the Oracle HCM team with journeys that you’ve announced recently. And I know, you know, we want to cover some areas that Steve and I have been working with Oracle on for the past couple of months. And, you know, one of the big topics and it continues to be a big topic is around, you know, mental health and well being. And so first, I would say, Can you share a little bit more, you know, generically about journeys and some of the innovations that you and the team have going on there. And then maybe dive in a little bit into how those journeys around mental health and well being and supporting that in your organization, are really coming into play with some of these new new customers, like Kaiser, for example.

Yvette Cameron 7:36
Yeah, yeah, thank you for the opportunity. I mean, we’ve been we’ve now been talking for two weeks solid about journeys and journeys is fundamentally a an enterprise employee experience platform that lets organizations deliver and craft the experiences that they need for their workforce across the entire enterprise. So not just related to the traditional HR experiences of a career move or learning or completing transactions, but also incorporating the needs of administrators and operations professionals across the enterprise, whether you’re trying to close the books, you’re trying to manage a new merger or acquisition, you know, IT support and guidance that is personalized for you is super important. And so that’s essentially what our platform does. And again, it’s not just I mean, we, of course, deliver a series of these out of the box. But more importantly, we give the tools, the intuitive tools that don’t require a high degree of it, or in some cases, no it to build those experiences from scratch. That’s the fundamental of the foundation of what it is that we’re offering through Oracle journeys.

Steve 8:51
Now, are you asked? Yes, go ahead. Yeah, go ahead. No, I want to say I like the fact that this kind of put some I don’t know, structure, or I don’t know, like some tangibility around what can be a fuzzy term, because everyone’s talking about employee experience, but through through what you guys are doing with journeys with with the launch pad, and with the Creator, you’re actually putting some some, I don’t know tangibility around something that’s kind of fuzzy and soft, right? Employee experiences, okay. It’s important, but what does that really mean? So we take something like newly promoted manager, say, or someone transferring to a new location, and what are the things that the organization wants to have the employee or the person go through? What steps do they have to take? What resources can we make available to them to help them to facilitate their, their, moving down the process, that’s what I really liked about it.

Yvette Cameron 9:41
Exactly, you know, there is a lot of talk and a lot of investment in this space of employee experiences and it runs the gamut from, you know, a wellness application to, to the, the, you know, integration of like teams and email. In some cases, it’s just putting a workflow layer on or an HR help desk or an IT help desk. Our approach is comprehensive, because we are a comprehensive offering, right not just across HCM, but we have the full enterprise capabilities and, and to your point, that ability to, you know, manage and launch and interact with all the journeys and explore and discover what’s possible is is is critical, that’s our Launchpad, our journeys creator is about being able to craft those experiences and assign them to the organization and have all that flexibility to to do those from scratch. And then our our journeys booster is about having full process automation. So, you know, in maybe a workflow that I would put on top I, you know, I might be able to, you know, launch or launch a HelpDesk ticket or other pieces, but with our booster capabilities and the various technologies that support that, that full ability to take and complete the process end to end, whether it’s within your enterprise or outside of your enterprise, having that full process and data integration. And being able to complete a process as part of the journey is super important. And at all times, we’re ensuring because we are the system of record, we know who you are, we know all your relationships, we understand the security and what you should and shouldn’t see, right, we’re able to make that very highly personalized guidance. So fundamentally a super powerful set of tools, even more exciting, guys, because it’s delivered with our core HR application. So there’s we’re not saying pay for an extra layer, you know, add these these additional things, fundamentally foundationally it’s so important that we focus on the experience of individuals in our workforce to ensure engagement and productivity, that we’ve made it foundational to our application.

I would love though, to come back to your original question Trish of so. So how is that helping mental health? Right? How is that helping people overcome the challenges that, you know, the pandemic has brought forward? And so shall I jump into that?

Trish 12:19
Yes, please do. Um, just one. One quick comment. I just have to tell you, too, is we kind of, you know, we’re joking a little bit about EBS and, and sort of thoughts on that. I think that, you know, depending on your background as a listener, if you’re not aware that, that truly having what you call it being the, you know, the system of record how important that is. So it’s like these subtle changes that have happened over many years, and now led to this experience with journeys. It’s like built on so many of the needs that maybe we had 10 years ago, using something like ABS that wasn’t as personalized was easy to personalize, whereas now, you’re really able to deliver on being that system of record in a highly, highly personalized way. I love that. I think if you’re someone who hasn’t implemented technology before, that’s a huge selling point to me if I were a buyer, so just wanted to put that out there.

Yvette Cameron 13:20
Yeah, if you could, for that added added commentary, the ability to make sure that as policies change from one region to another, that what even shows up on the screen is relevant to me, right, you’re only going to get that because we understand, you know, we are that system of record. Alright, so back then to the question of how we’re supporting mental health and accessibility. So, um, you know, we have done a lot of work in this space, we did a survey at work earlier, and, you know, found a lot of a lot of truths that we suspected, but we got validated with data. So, you know, over let’s see, what was the number it was over 48% of people had indicated that this COVID pandemic had really, over 48% of individuals had indicated that the pandemic had adversely affected their mental health. And over half of the organizations, the executives and HR leaders said that they really struggle in their organization with the impacts of you know, their employees mental health, on business, on productivity, on engagement, and so forth. And they found it really difficult and exacerbated, of course, by the need to switch to remote work, you know, where some organizations were slowly moving to that. Many had to make that that move almost overnight and the feeling of disruption, connectedness, the technical challenges of being able to manage work remotely, when that’s not how you were engaged people suffering from the technology gaps, now that the connectedness gaps you struggling with not having face to face communication, many, many, many different challenges. Now we’re looking at trying to return people to work slowly. And we’re having to face that, you know, there’s been a year of challenge for people, the the depression and the sense of isolation that many have suffered, but also the reality that for those who who are trying to make the choice, if they’re given it, do I return to work or not, am I going to be retaliated against right, there’s kind of a dual class concern here are those who are at work going to be perceived more valuable or more committed or more engaged than those who choose to remain home, they may be choosing to remain home, because perhaps they’re scared, their kids still haven’t returned to school. So they have to. So there’s there’s a lot of challenge here. We believe, again, that our our capability through employee journeys can help organizations manage and support not just, you know, returning to work, but returning to work in a safe and healthy way in a way that supports mental health and physical health. And here’s how we do that.

Oracle journeys is, is essentially the way to orchestrate a series of steps in a large journey, right? When you’re planning a vacation, your journey, you’re researching where you want to go, you’re researching the travel and how to pay for it, when use points, do I use cash, where do I stay? What activities are we going to do, what special events we’re going to fly or drive exists, so you’re crafting out and, and researching and going through a lot of personal decisions on that that journey? Well, the same happens at work. So as people are thinking about, for example, returning to work, or they’re at work, but they’re in this new hybrid environment, you can assemble a series of steps that incorporate everything from research, education, peer to peer conversations, questionnaires, tests, transactions, of course, you know, getting security clearance to the new building, hearing messages, from managers, anything, anything that you need, can be assembled and managed just very naturally through this orchestration of process. And you’re taken naturally through those steps, you can make some happen in a certain order, you can determine that you can’t progress to certain ones until other things have been completed. And at all times that information is very relevant to me, if I’ve already provided information to you, we’re not going to ask you for it again. So from a mental health perspective, imagine the benefit, when I’m looking at returning to work that as a, as a manager, I’m given education on, you know, how to have the difficult conversations, how to demonstrate empathy, in those conversations, I’m able to survey my my workforce and get a constant pulse on how individuals and the team as a whole are feeling and I’m, I’m guided through how to, you know, again, how to communicate more effectively, that there is, you know, again, there can be content that has been created by others in the team who have returned to work and are encouraging others, you know, to stay connected and, and, you know, sharing their experiences and improving those journeys for everybody that comes after. I mean, there’s just so many ways that because these journeys can consist literally of anything, that it makes it super relevant and supportive to people as they return to work.

Trish 18:59
Thank you so much, because I think sometimes we hear you know, a term or a phrase, like journeys, and people might not really think there’s something truly behind that. And I think what you just described is such a good example, especially from a mental health perspective of, of how impactful technology can be in helping your employees. And as they return to work, you know, as you as you were talking, I was writing down, you know, there’s such anxiety in based on your survey results you shared, and I know Steve and I have covered a lot of the AI at work over the last couple months with you all. It’s such a fear of the unknown that employees have right now and even leaders have right now and by by your example of using journeys, to provide that information to provide communication to provide training where it’s needed to provide resources that are constantly being updated in a very specific sort of meaningful way. To me that is a game changer. That right there is how you’re going to help employees feel more comfortable and leaders feel more comfortable and, and to take that anxiety level down a little bit. Because that’s really kind of, we’re super stressed not so much about what’s behind us. We’ve all lived through that. Right? It’s more about like, what’s to come? What’s next? So thank you, I really appreciate, you know, you sharing that that’s really meaningful.

Yvette Cameron 20:21
I think that as, as a manager myself, right, who is I mean, we’ve never gone through this, this, this pandemic is truly and I hate the word but unprecedented it is. and really understanding what what should I do? How do I manage this? How do I how do I know how people are thinking I, I love that these new capabilities and in like the journeys platform have come forward to help, you know, HR can craft this with, with the support of others, I can take and take that take those delivered, you know, suggested journeys, and even tailor them further for my own team based on what I know, but I’m getting that help in that guidance to be a better manager. And as an employee, right I I’m in a safe, trusted environment. The org, the content is is is really, you know, truly reflects what the organization knows about me. And I’m, and I know it’s safe, it’s not being shared all over, you know, was speaking of safe. It’s interesting from that same survey, I mentioned earlier, the AI at work survey, we were asking questions of, you know, how do you how do you as an individual want to receive kind of, you know, mental health coaching and discussions? Do you want to talk to an EAP advisor, which again, could be one of those steps in the journey is here connect with somebody? Or, you know, do you want to talk to a robot or, you know, a kind of an AI driven, you know, technology. And it was it was really interesting and a little disheartening to me a little bit that 77% of millennials 77% said they prefer to talk to a robot than their managers or a person about, you know, anxiety that they have, but how cool in a journey to be able to embed, right if your organization has that that kind of technology contract where, you know, support and assistance is there and divided. That provided through rope, robotic processing, digital assistance, and so forth, make that one or many, you know, touch points within the the entire journey, it’s not just one and done. But you know, you, you have that conversation, and it’s constant. And it’s and you’re reminded, and you’re nudged to have those conversations again, and again, through the digital assistant through those robotics. I mean, that’s possible now in today’s technology. So we have to recognize that these consumer grade experiences, I personally hate to talk to somebody about anything I’m ordering online, God forbid I have a problem. And I happen to talk to a customer agent, I cannot stand it, love dealing with, you know, a digital assistant that’s really short and brief or self select. And, and I want that ability. In my HR service center, I want that ability in my company, if I don’t want to talk to somebody Don’t make me and that’s possible now and easily enabled through things like Oracle journey. So that’s, that’s a real exciting transformation, as we come out of the pandemic, to to see the new capabilities to engage and help our workforce.

Steve 23:25
Yeah, one thing that I think I’d add here some opportunity, I can see with these, these solutions, and the journey designer, creator, which is one of the things we see consistently around and mental health, specifically right around employees are using or accessing benefits that they might have available to them or resources they have available to him his lack of awareness. They simply often you see, employees report back when they’re serving that, hey, I just didn’t know that these tools were available to me these resources were available to me, I didn’t know that our meant our health plan covered XYZ I just didn’t know right? And I don’t blame them, right? People are busy, our job, our lives and jobs are more complicated maybe than ever before, we’re stressed more than ever before. So I think this could also be an opportunity for organizations to surface resources that employees have available to them that they may not just, they may forget or may not be aware about and really encourage them to, to take advantage of opportunities and resources that are provided to them.

Yvette Cameron 24:28
I’m so so glad that you said that. Steve, you know when people hear about experiences and journeys, especially when they’re delivered by an HCM provider as opposed to like a niche application that you would put on, they think checklists, right? Okay, it’s the traditional life event checklist, check, check, check, I’m done. But it’s not honestly the transactions of saying I’ve had a marital change or I’ve returned to work or I’ve added a beneficiary that trend action is such a small piece. And more and more of these journeys are not about completing a data transaction in the HR system. They’re about education, knowledge, awareness, connecting people to, to your point to their benefits, making sure that knowledge is there and readily available at the right time and nudging you and bring that up at at appropriate times. And, and, and, and again, there may be no transaction at all, in a journey that results in an update of data in the HR system. And that’s, that’s perfectly fine. In fact, it’s, it’s preferred, because we don’t spend on a regular date basis, the majority of time in HR systems updating data, right? I mean, we change jobs, we have salary changes, but our data in the data system doesn’t change every day. But what does change every day is our need for information, for connectivity, for knowledge, for support, and guidance. And, and those those nudges to, you know, keep keep going. And that’s what these journeys are about. And again, it’s about journeys around returning to work or, you know, you’re back. And now you’ve got to face a reduction in force or, or an acquisition, right, or you’re closing the books on the fiscal year and starting for the new one. These are not HR processes, but their work processes for people. And these journeys are ultimately about supporting people in the business. So I’m super excited about that. I’m so glad you brought that up knowledge, access to benefits, information, perks and discounts, frankly, prescription drug discounts, you know, really important. And those are the kinds of things you could say, Hey, did you know? So these are, these are all real important aspects?

Trish 26:51
Well, and thank you for Gosh, I just keep saying like, that’s the differentiator right there. That’s one of the key. Um, there are many, but that’s one key one, I think, you know, a lot of companies are out there saying, Oh, we have a checklist for return to work, we have a checklist for this or a checklist for that. I love that you say it’s not about the transactions, they could be part of it. But that’s not what it’s about. It’s about that communication.

Steve 27:10
Good stuff, quite frankly, it’s kind of simple to, to program, if you will, or to develop, right, it’s not that hard to create a list that says, oh, if you’ve had a life event, update this, check this box, update that record, you know, that’s when we were joking. I’m not joking, by the way, but he does the sweet I want to talk about that’s more but but okay, sweet and PeopleSoft did that stuff excellently 25 years ago, right, like, so different? Yeah. So this is much, much different and much more important, and much more honestly, as you said, much more impactful. Right, because ultimately, you know, these things are not changing all that much. But the underlying need for support for resources for learning connection, you name it, right, those things are everyday occurrences and, and honestly becoming more important, you know,

Trish 28:02
Having your employees be heard, you know, your employees. The one thing when you were talking about the millennials, for example, in their results, wanting more of this chatbot or, you know, some sort of a digital assistant to assist them, which Personally, I would like that as well. That’s just an option we didn’t have when we started our careers, the three of us and think about the, you know, we were measuring for engagement. Back in the day, I worked at PwC, for example, and used PeopleSoft, we were made measuring engagement, but yet, we had so many of us who didn’t feel like we had any outlet to share those sorts of anxieties or stressors or whatever. And not only that, we didn’t just each point we didn’t know where to get information, either. So it was sort of this this black hole. And then you wonder why our generation wasn’t maybe as engaged as our leaders hoped. So to me, Oracle journeys, and the advancements you’ve made even on other friends, that’s the difference. That’s where we’re giving these employees today, tools we didn’t have, right, it’s like the dream tools. We wanted these things. I don’t know, it just has to lead to more engaged in employees if they’re if they’re feeling heard, and that they’re feeling part of it.

Yvette Cameron 29:10
Yeah, and good points. And I think one of the fundamental things that has changed from back then, quote, unquote, I would say how many years and today is the advent of artificial intelligence. And, you know, it’s been improving year over year. And now like, like Oracle journeys, you know, artificial intelligence is able to drive these recommendations at the right time. And fundamentally, you know, it’s all focused on ensuring, you know, individual, you know, guidance and, and personalization and relevancy. But the another net result coming out of this is that now HR is able to really take ownership for the experiences of the workforce and really become the centers of Innovation right creating and crafting nice things far beyond their their walls of typical responsibility and HR and managing HR records and systems, they can add to the the the relevancy and the success of how people perform their work every day by crafting these really highly unique journeys for individuals, for teams, for regions, departments, lines of business, etc. So, so super exciting there. And then I love that, that these journeys are dynamic, and individuals themselves can improve the journeys for others, right, create their own content, create videos, or commentaries, questionnaires, leverage questionnaires and, and that content can be brought into to form new journeys or additional steps as as the company learns more from others, and just really be a peer to peer knowledge and growth area.

Steve 30:58
Yvette, I’ve one last thing for me, and you’re taking me right to my question. I don’t know if you maybe it’s too early to know this. But one of the things we know we’ve learned from our friends at Oracle over the last several years, particularly is how engaged your customer community is, you’ve got a huge customer community, they’re very engaged with each other, as well as engaging with our friends at Oracle right on product updates and new features, etc, etc. And Chris talks about that a lot too. But I wonder if we see if you can envision maybe like almost like a library or a recipe lab kind of emerging once more people begin to craft journeys in their organizations. And like organizations in the customer community potentially sharing their how they’re approaching some of these things with each other and kind of building a really kind of interesting repository of kind of innovative ways to use this. Do you think something like that might happen?

Yvette Cameron 31:49
I think something like that has already started.

Steve 31:52
Wow.

Yvette Cameron 31:53
So here’s, here’s what we do. So at Oracle, as I said, we are pre delivering journeys with our application. And as you know, we deliver updates four times a year, trusted, easy to consume innovation, low impact, I think we’re our downtime every year is less than 17 hours and his best 16 hours every year maximum, right, so almost almost no downtime. And in those releases, more and more journeys are being pre delivered. But we’ve also been delivering them in our customer community. And you’re right, highly engaged, we have over 55,000 users in our cloud community, and focused on HCM usage. And we routinely deliver different kinds of reports that people can use, we deliver templates preceded journeys that have, you know, the guidance of the support and the suggested best practices in addition to delivery. So we’re not we’re not waiting quarter to quarter for new staff. As soon as we have new journeys, we put them out there in the community for immediate release. And then just as we’ve seen on the reporting side, where we issue reports all the time when we deliver them through the community, and then customers have really started to share hundreds of their own versions of reports and best practices by industry by region. We fully expect that to happen here on journeys. Already, we’re seeing in our customer Advisory Council that I was just part of the last three days, a lot of collaboration about Oh, wouldn’t it be great? If and how will you know who thought about this? And what’s the best practice for this scenario. So based on what we’ve seen in other areas of our community, this will be a huge area of innovation, where people can go and share the knowledge and experiences of other customers across the globe and in their industry to make their own experiences better. And partners are part of this too, right partners already jumping on the bandwagon saying how do we bring these our own experiences and expertise to deliver more journeys to customers? And so our journeys marketplace, we’re partners we’ll be delivering their capabilities is, is starting to emerge as well. So you’re spot on, it’s it’s not only something I can envision. It’s something I’m starting to see. With us starting the process. Yeah.

Trish 34:09
And it’s love that.

Steve 34:10
Yeah, I think Trish, it’s a great thing. And it’s something for HR folks to consider when they’re making kind of decisions around technology is things like ecosystem communities, right partners, and just the institutional knowledge that comes from a company like Oracle, who’s been at this a long time and has such a highly engaged customer community in such a large one, go ahead Trish.

Trish 34:32
Oh, sorry. I was just gonna say to that. We just recently heard within the last month from Chris, where he was saying that most of the innovations that are happening actually come from customers. So back to kind of being heard, if you want to be heard, you want to work with a vendor as a partner, who’s actually going to listen to your ideas, who’s actually going to give you opportunities to share those ideas with other people who are also customers and then to further see that put into the software that you’re you’re using, right? So you, you do get to actually have the fruits of the labor, right? Not just the idea. So I’m sorry about it, did I get so excited about this? Because, again, this is a stuff like I’m like, Oh, I wish I were in HR right now, right? Like using this, this is?

Yvette Cameron 35:20
Well, you, you, we’ve all been friends for many, many years. And you’ve, you’ve worked with me under many different company logos. And so you know, I, I’ve got a lot of experience with vendors in this space. And I can tell you, I have never seen such a big, deeply engaged customer community. And we are customer obsessed, right chris Christie, talk about customer obsession, and customer partnership. And, you know, just a radical focus on innovation and ensuring that, you know, all three are connected. And and I’ll tell you through, you know, through that obsession and that commitment to their success, we see such a highly engaged, as we said, customer base, and it truly is unique. I’ve been in major players in the industry and I’ve never experienced this kind of focus and obsession and engagement and and an engaged community as I have here at Oracle. So wicked exciting. Yeah, to be a part of.

Steve 36:21
Yvette, this has been a great conversation. Thank you for joining us taking some time to share what you’ve been up to. And it seems like a lot and just five months, you bet you set a bar pretty high, you’re probably gonna have to, you’re probably gonna have to keep it rolling for the second part of this year,

Yvette Cameron 36:37
A little scary, but it’s exciting.

Steve 36:39
Right, great stuff. So we will put some links in the show notes to some of the things we’ve talked about today. And the journeys release and some other cool things. And yeah, again, it’s been so fun to catch up you’ve had It’s been a while Good to see you again. Good to get an update on what’s happening and yeah, definitely check out with the stuff Oracle is doing. It’s it’s phenomenal. And I’m a little bit biased because I remember the legacy of E business suite, honestly, but you’re doing well, I got to stop talking about it. I’m literally the only person left talking about it. But thanks so much. All right, Trish good stuff. good fun.

We will get the show posted. Get the show notes updated. Oh Trish, by the way, just a quick, Yvette too, we are now posting transcripts of the shows on HRHappyHour.net. Full Text transcripts. We been a little bit slack and doing that we have started doing that. So look for that as well. I’m really excited about that.

Yvette Cameron 37:34
Right. Well thank you guys again, both Steve Trish, so great to have this conversation today. Thank you.

Steve 37:39
All right, thank you. All right for Trish McFarlane, for our guest Yvette Cameron, my name is Steve Boese. Thank you for listening to the HR Happy Hour Show. We will see you next time and bye for now.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai