The Emphasis Now Is on Differentiating the Business

Shawn Price, Senior Vice President of Cloud for Oracle on innovation in the Cloud, business readiness of the HR departments and the importance of leadership.

- Ester Martinez and J Jerry Moses

Shawn Price is the Senior Vice President of Cloud at Oracle. As the leader of Oracle’s Cloud Go-to-Market and Product Business Groups (including Technology, Applications, and Hardware), Shawn is responsible for driving the growth of Oracle’s Cloud portfolio of integrated services across data, applications, platform, and infrastructure.

There has been a lot of emphasis on Cloud as a technology & there are other technological and demographic transformations happening too. How do you think companies can handle such changes?

How I look at this is – why do you have to move to the Cloud? What’s happening environmentally that drives you to the Cloud? Companies today are more likely to retain their talent today. But millennials are asking questions such as, Am I valued? Am I learning? Am I engaged? Do I have an opportunity to advance? Let’s say you worked as a part-time person in the holiday season, and now you have a job opportunity there. And I make you go back to the HR and make you go through the entire on boarding process again. The question is: Why can’t the store manager just connect via SMS and go through my LinkedIn? Wouldn’t it be interesting if we had a conversation and allow the manager in the store to hire on the spot which would collapse a two-week hiring process into hours?

So, if you look at the catalysts – it is cost reduction, retention, the implications of onboarding new employees and integration of culture. All these become the catalyst for why the infrastructure of the past doesn’t fit anymore, in addition to the sort of cliché of social, mobile etc.

Only if leaders are willing to re-look at their business models, the approach to solving the problem differently and create a culture that actually aligns to that – will it be successful. So, do you think leadership is the key?