In this episode of the Oracle University Podcast, Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham are joined by Mitchell Flinn, VP of Program Management for the CSS Platform, to explore Oracle Cloud Success Navigator.   This interactive platform is designed to help customers optimize their cloud journey, offering best practices, AI tools, and personalized guidance from implementation to innovation. Don’t miss this insider look at maximizing your Oracle Cloud investment!   Oracle Cloud Success Navigator Essentials: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ou/course/oracle-cloud-success-navigator-essentials/147489/242186 Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/ X: https://x.com/Oracle_Edu   Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, David Wright, Kris-Ann Nansen, Radhika Banka, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode. ---------------------------------------------------------------- Episode Transcript:

00:00

Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast, the first stop on your cloud journey. During this series of informative podcasts, we’ll bring you foundational training on the most popular Oracle technologies. Let’s get started!

00:25

Nikita: Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast! I’m Nikita Abraham, Team Lead of Editorial Services with Oracle University, and joining me is my co-host Lois Houston, Director of Innovation Programs. 

Lois: Hi everyone! Today is the first of a two-part special on Oracle Cloud Success Navigator. This is a tool that provides you with a clear path to cloud transformation and helps you get the most out of your cloud investment.

00:52

Nikita: And to tell us more about this, we have Mitchell Flinn joining us today. Mitchell is VP of Program Management for Oracle Cloud Success Navigator. In this episode, we’ll ask Mitchell about the ins and outs of this powerful platform, its benefits, key features, and the role it plays in streamlining cloud journeys.

Lois: Yeah. Hi Mitchell! What is Oracle's approach to cloud technology and customer success, and how does the Cloud Success Navigator support this philosophy?

01:22

Mitchell: Oracle has an amazing amount of industry-leading enterprise cloud technologies across our entire portfolio. All of this is at your disposal. That, coupled with the sole focus of your success, forms the crux of the company's transformational journey. In other words, we put your success at the heart of everything we do.

For each organization, the path to achieve maximum value from our technology is unique. Success Navigator reflects our emphasis on being there with you throughout the entire journey to steer you to success. 

01:53

Nikita: Ok, what about from a business’s viewpoint? Why would they need the Navigator?

Mitchell: Businesses across every industry are moving mission-critical applications to the cloud. However, business leaders understand that there's no one-size-fits-all model for cloud development and deployment.

Some fundamentals for success are your need to ensure new technologies are seamlessly integrated into day-to-day operations and continually optimize to align with evolving business requirements. You must ensure stakeholder visibility through the journey with updates at every stage. Building system efficiencies into other key tasks, which has to be done at the forefront when considering your cloud transformation.

You also need to quickly identify risks and address them during the implementation process and beyond. Beyond the technical execution, cloud deployments also require significant process and organizational changes to ensure that adoption is aligned with business goals and delivers tangible benefits.

Moreover, the training process for new features after cloud adoption can be an organization wide initiative that needs special attention. These requirements or more can be addressed through Oracle Cloud Success Navigator, which is a new interactive digital platform to guide you through all stages of your cloud journey.

03:09

Lois: Mitchell, how does Cloud Success Navigator platform enhance the user experience? How does it support customers at different stages of their cloud journey?

Mitchell: Platform is included for free for all cloud application customers. And core to Success Navigator is the goal of increasing transparency among customers, partners in the Oracle team, from project kickoff through quarterly releases. Included in the platform are implementation best practices, Oracle Modern Best Practices focused on solutions provided by our applications, and guidance on living within the cloud.  

Success Navigator supports you for every stage of your Oracle journey. You can first get your bearings and understand what's possible with your cloud solution using preconfigured starter environments to support your design decisions. It helps you chart a proven course by providing access to Oracle expertise and Oracle Modern Best Practices, so you can use cloud quality standards to guide your implementation approach.

You can find value from quarterly releases using AI assistants and preview environments to experience and adopt latest features that matter to you. And you can blaze new trails by building your own cloud roadmap based on your organization's goals, keeping you focused on the capabilities you need for day-to-day and the road ahead.

04:24

Nikita: How does the Navigator cater to the needs of all the different customers?

Mitchell: For customers just getting started with Oracle implementations, Navigator provides a framework with success criteria for each stakeholder involved in the implementation, and provides recommended milestones and checklists to keep everyone on track.

For existing customers and experienced cloud customers thriving in the cloud, it provides contextually relevant insights based on your cloud landscape. It prepares you for quarterly releases and preview environments, and enables the use of AI and optimization within your cloud investment.

For our partners, it allows Oracle to work in a collaborative way to really team up for our customers. Navigator gives transparency to all stakeholders and helps determine what success criteria we should be thinking about at each milestone phase of the journey. And it also helps customers and partners get more out of their Oracle investment through a seamless process.

05:20

Lois: Right. Mitchell, can you elaborate on the use cases of the platform? How does it address challenges and requirements during cloud implementations?

Mitchell: We can create transparency and alignment between you, your partner, and the Oracle team using shared view of progress measured through standard criteria.

We can incorporate recommended key milestones and activities to help you visualize and measure your progress. And we can use built-in assessments, remove risk, and ask the right questions at the right time to make the right implementation decisions for your organization.

Additionally, we can use Starter Configuration, which allows you to experience the latest capabilities and leading practices to enrich design decisions for your organization with Starter Configuration. This can activate Starter Configuration early in your journey to understand what delivered capability can do for you.

It allows you to evaluate modern best practices to determine how your design process can work in the future. And it empowers and educates your organization by interacting with real capability, using real processes to make the right decisions for your cloud implementation. You're able to access new features in Fusion updates. You can do this to learn what you need to know about new features in a one-stop shop and connect your company in a compelling capacity.

You can find, familiarize, and prioritize new and existing features in one place. And you can experience new features in hands-on preview environments available with you with each quarterly release. You can explore new theme-based approaches using adoption centers for AI and Redwood to understand where to start and how to get there. And you can understand innovation opportunities based on business processes, data insights, and industry benchmarks.

07:01

Nikita: Now that we’ve covered the basics, can you walk us through some of the key features of the platform? Let’s start with the Home page.

Mitchell: This is the starting point of the customer journey and the central location for everything Navigator has to offer, including best practice content. You'll find content focused on implementation phase, the innovation phase, and administrative elements like the team structure, program and projects, and other relevant tips and tricks.

Cloud Quality Standards provides learning content and checklists for successful business transformation. This helps support the effective adoption and adherence to Cloud Quality Standards and enables individuals to leverage AI and predictive insights.

The feature Sunburst allows capability for features to be reviewed in an interactive graphic, illustrating new features by pillar, other attributes, which enable customers to review features curated to identify and adopt new features that meet their needs. It helps you understand recommended features across your application base based off of a production profile, covering mandatory adoption requirements, efficiency gains, innovation capabilities like AI and Redwood to drive business change.

Next is the Adoption Center, which addresses the need of our existing and implementing customers. It covers the concept of how Redwood is an imperative for our application customers, what it means, and how, and when we could translate some of the requirements to a business user or an IT user.

Roadmap is an opportunity for the team to evaluate which features are most interesting at any given moment, the items that they would like to adopt next, and save features or items that they might require later.

08:36

Lois: That’s great. Mitchell, I know we have two new features rolling out in 2025. Can you tell us a little bit about them?

Mitchell: Preview Environment. This allows users to explore new features and orderly release through a shared environment by logging into Navigator, eliminating potential regression needs, data adjustments and loads, and other common pre-work. You can explore the feature directly with the support of Oracle Guided Learning.

The second additional feature for 2025 is AI Assist. We've taken everything within Navigator and trained an LLM to provide customers the ability to inquire about best practices, solutions, and features within the applications and ultimately make them smarter as they prepare for areas like design workshops, quarterly release readiness, and engaging across our overall Oracle team.

Customers can use, share, and apply Oracle content knowledge to their day-to-day responsibilities.

09:32

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10:01

Nikita: Welcome back! Mitchell, how can I get started with the Navigator?

Mitchell: To request customer access to Success Navigator's environment, you need to submit a request form via the Success Navigator page on oracle.com. 

You need to be able to provide your customer support identifier with the help icon around the CSI number. If you don't have your CSI number, you can still submit your request and a member of the Success Navigator team will reach out and coordinate with you to understand the information that's required.

Once access is granted, you'll receive a welcome email to Oracle Cloud Success Navigator.

10:35

Lois: Alright, and after that’s done?

Mitchell: Before implementing Oracle Cloud Applications in your organization, you need to think of a structure that helps you organize and manage that implementation. To implement a solution footprint for a relatively small organization operating in a single country, and with an implementation time of only a few months, defining a single project might be a good enough organization to manage the implementation.

For example, if you're implementing Core Human Capital Management applications, you could define a single project for that. But if you're implementing a broad solution footprint for a large business across multiple organizational entities in multiple countries, and with an implementation time of several years, a single project isn't enough. In such cases, organizations typically define a structure of a program with multiple underlying projects that reflect the scope, approach, timelines of business transformation.

For example, you're implementing both HCM and ERP applications in a two-phased approach. You might decide to define a program with two underlying projects, one for HCM and one for ERP. For large, international business transformations, you can define multiple programs, each with multiple underlying projects.

For example, you might first need to define a global design for a common way of working with HCM and then start rolling out that global design to individual countries. In such a scenario, you might define a program called HCM Transformation with a first project for global design, followed by multiple projects associated with individual countries. You could do the same for ERP.

12:16

Nikita: Mitchell, we’ve mentioned “cloud journey” a few times in this conversation, but can you tell us a little more about it? How can teams use it to guide their work?

Mitchell: The main purpose of Oracle's cloud journey is to provide leading practices and actionable guidance to customers and implementation partners for successful implementations, operations within the cloud, and innovation through Oracle Cloud solutions. These are defined in terms of stages, activities, topics, and milestones. They focus on, how do you do the right things at the right time the first time.

For customers, implementation partners in the cloud journey, this allows us to facilitate collaboration and transparency, accelerate the journey, and visualize and measure our progress.

12:59

Lois: We’ll stop here for today. Join us next week as we continue our discussion on Oracle Cloud Success Navigator. 

Nikita: And if want to look at some demos of everything we touched upon today, head over to mylearn.oracle.com and take a look at the Oracle Cloud Success Navigator Essentials course. Until next time, this is Nikita Abraham…

Lois: And Lois Houston, signing off!

13:22

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