Experience, with 75 sessions aimed at sharing our journey to the cloud with conference attendees. The showcase was the most highly attended applications venue at the conference.
It’s important for us all to share our lessons learned about transformation, because McKinsey research suggests most of us are not very good at it. Fewer than 20% of companies have succeeded in sustainably improving their business performance. It’s even starker by industry—digitally savvy industries like high tech, media, and telecom are seeing better success at 30%, while traditional industries like oil and gas, automotive, infrastructure, and pharma succeed less than 10% of the time.
This can be tough, though, because while most people say they like change, the reality is they don’t. According to, business transformation success is often stymied by entrenched viewpoints, resistance to change, and legal and compliance concerns. But at Oracle, we are ruthless about the change required.
While we could have hired someone from outside to steward the change process, the reality is knowing and understanding how our business currently works is instrumental to the execution of the transformation so that I can be savvy with regard to any conversation with another internal leader. Once I’ve identified the problem we are targeting to fix, I work diligently to get agreement with the CEO’s office before moving forward.