Author: Dipak Patel, Client Innovation Director, Namos Solutions
Turning Oracle Quarterly innovation into business impact
Let me start with a simple question. Do quarterly updates feel like opportunity or disruption?
I suspect there’s lots of organisations for who the latter is their reality when it should be the former. I’ve been in Solution Consulting (presales in old money) for most of my career and my experience of revisiting clients post initial go live reflects that reality. Clients would tell me they have struggled with this or can’t do that, and have users frustrated over all sorts, yet I was thinking “all those problems have been resolved over the past 3 or 4 updates”. So, the question becomes, what went wrong?
After all, the pace of innovation keeps accelerating and Oracle Cloud applications will continue delivering new capabilities on a predictable quarterly cycle; it’s one of the key reasons organisations invested in cloud solutions.
However, there are organisations for who quarterly updates are an opportunity. They’re the ones that have built a habit of adoption. Not a never-ending transformation program, but a repeatable way of deciding what matters, what’s safe, what’s next and how to prove it worked.
These organisations are Innovation adoption ready. Not adopting features for the sake of it but focussed on adopting the right innovation in ways that make work easier for their people and delivering outcomes their business can clearly measure.
Go-live was just the end of the beginning.
Organisations are brilliant at go ‑live. On time and on budget with huge fanfare and deserved celebration. The challenge usually starts afterwards if they don’t have an Innovation adoption ready mindset in place for those inevitable quarterly updates. Go-live is the start line, not the finish so if we don’t adapt accordingly, quarterly updates feel like something being done to you. If it’s treated as a living, evolving solution that you continuously improve, those same updates become a predictable roadmap for progress and improvement. That’s the mindset shift in being Innovation adoption ready.
Why does quarterly innovation adoption feel hard?
When new updates and innovation feel like a lot of hard work and you struggle to show value, it’s usually because a few familiar issues are in play:
- There’s no clear process or cadence for innovation. Release notes circulate, then disappear into day jobs. Nothing changes outside of what’s mandatory or regulatory.
- Ownership is unclear. IT tests updates, the business expects outcomes and improvements, but nobody owns adoption end-to-end‑.
- There’s understandable fear of breaking BAU, so “defer” becomes the default decision, and technical debt builds up.
- Success isn’t defined, so teams stay busy but can’t prove incremental value, or worse yet, they can’t justify change as it’s not aligned to value or critical KPI’s.
Staying close to ‘out of the box’ is a valuable strategy so you have capacity to innovate, rather than maintaining bespoke decisions & configuration. At Namos, we are strong advocates of ‘adopt not adapt’ and of Oracle Modern Best Practices for this very reason, making innovation adoption easier so you cross the go-live start line ready to exploit each update. Our managed services QBR’s have pivoted from retrospective ticket focus, to forward looking, outcomes driven agendas, that help you to keep delivering incremental improvements.
‘Innovation Adoption’ ready operating model.
The good news is that being Innovation adoption ready doesn’t mean building a giant Centre of Excellence, or endless meetings and piles of documents, but rather several simple and easy to do things working together, quarter after quarter.
The solution was already in place during the program delivery phase. Business process owners, functional and technical SME’s, executive sponsors who were engaged during delivery phase now have a new ‘BAU’ role to play in helping your implementation stabilise post go live, and its continued optimisation in meeting your business needs by taking on board relevant ‘needle moving’ innovation.
A quick self-check: are you ‘Innovation adoption’ ready?
How you chose to organise your BAU teams is down to you, but a good checklist on readiness for your transition from go live to BAU is that you find most of these are true.
- Named owners are retained across the business for each functional area (including process owners, functional SME’s and IT).
- A repeatable plan for quarterly rhythm, not last‑minute heroics squeezed in around the ‘day job’.
- QBR’s that are forward looking outcomes-based and not retrospective ‘ticket focussed’
- A single visible adoption roadmap shared within the business (better yet if with your SI and Oracle) defined collaboratively and aligned to business needs that has clear distinction on what’s now, what’s next and what’s for later.
- Success defined in measurable outcomes and experience, not just activity.
This approach gives BAU teams purpose, agreeing on what innovation matters most to you as they are connected to the outcomes your business needs, yet are sensitive to the challenges users face day to day. There is accountability as a result, so innovation is adopted well as functional owners understand what needs to change, technical owners understand the risk, dependencies and platform related impact and change owners champion what’s coming so it lands within the business.
If it’s not broken.
Organisations also need to figure out how to overcome the fear of change breaking things. I get this, it’s a monumental task to deliver a successful go-live, so let’s not break anything! However, a controlled approach that aligns with business needs, is supported by best practice, and is focussed on regression, validation and testing before moving to production is essential for innovation to be ‘safe by design’.
Track results and measure outcomes
It’s also important to not let improvements from adopting new innovations or capabilities go unnoticed and unmeasured. Getting this right is where we show innovation and adoption as having real business value. I’ve seen many organisations get blindsided with ‘traditional’ service metrics on SLAs. These are important for system ‘health’ and stability, but we need to measure the impact of innovation through a new lens.
- Experience Level Agreements (XLAs): XLA’s track user confidence and adoption giving insight into how well the solution has been accepted by users.
- Value Level Agreements (VLAs): VLA’s measure KPI driven outcomes that the business cares about. VLA’s are often but not always reliant on XLA’s being in place.
The takeaway
Oracle will keep delivering innovation quarter on quarter. I heard someone say that the pace of change is the fastest it’s ever been but the slowest that it ever will be. AI will only add to this acceleration. The organisations that get real value quarter over quarter are those who built the capability to absorb change calmly, adopt what matters, and prove measurable results. If you want to learn more about how to enable Oracle applications so you are innovation adoption ready, talk to us at Namos, we have a track record of delivering best practice implementations and class leading Managed Services.
Following on from this, in part 2 of the series I will share how you can make better decisions on what’s now, next and later for your innovation roadmap, and in part 3 how you can measure the value from innovation, so your efforts don’t go unnoticed.
