Oracle Cloud in higher education: best practices for designing journeys to provide a personalized staff and faculty experience

Oracle Journeys was designed to simplify and personalize the employee experience by providing guidance when and where it is needed most in the moments that matter, like with the birth of a child or returning back to campus for a new semester. While many institutions initially adopted Oracle Journeys to support the onboarding and off-boarding of their workforce, it can be used to provide support to employees more broadly throughout their entire tenure at an institution. Journeys is one of several modules that make up the recently unveiled ‘Oracle ME’ platform, aimed at helping employees to connect, grow, and thrive together.

To help institutions more rapidly uptake Oracle Journeys, Oracle has now developed nearly 40 pre-designed journeys with a baseline of tasks and content that institutions can build upon and tailor. These journeys can help to quickly provide additional support to employees, managers and human resources through their life and career transitions, including marriage, illness, promotions, and much more.

To support institutions on the journey with Oracle Journeys, Courtney Mecikalski, an experienced manager on Baker Tilly’s enterprise solutions and services consulting team, recently discussed best practices and recommendations for designing journeys at the Higher Education User Group (HEUG) Alliance 2022 conference.

1. Think creatively. Don’t be afraid to think outside the box of “this is what we do today” or “this is what we’ve always done.” Brainstorm across internal teams and research key trends or common business cycles within your institution. For example, are there certain events that happen every month, semester or year that a journey could help support? Consider if there are certain processes where faculty and staff face more challenges and questions than others. Take the opportunity to think beyond traditional HR use cases and explore if there are business processes across finance, campus security or other departments that journeys could help to supplement.
2. Expand your stakeholder group. Include tasks not only for employees, but also for managers, HR, learning and development, security, IT, finance, and other teams within your institution. With your key stakeholders, discuss where groups may complete activities outside of Oracle Cloud or on paper today, and use the move to Oracle Journeys as an opportunity to transform manual processes into the cloud and reduce your paper footprint.