CIO Interview with Joey Fitts, Group Vice President, Analytics Product Strategy at Oracle

“Advanced data analytics lets organizations analyze large, complex datasets, uncovering trends and patterns through machine learning techniques, enabling better-informed decisions and more efficient operations.”

Hi Joey, welcome to CIO Influence’s interview series 2024. Please tell us about Oracle’s current approach to Cloud Analytics and Business Intelligence. 

Oracle’s approach to leading in cloud analytics is to focus on embedding AI and ML into our cloud offerings to enable our customers to gain data-driven insights and make informed decisions without needing to code. Our goal is to provide customers with a single platform that can handle all their analytics workflows, from data ingestion to insights to actions all powered by AI and ML which can help organizations improve efficiency, and make better decisions while reducing costs and complexities.

We also recently included advanced conversational capabilities powered by natural language processing, ML, and generative AI.

At the same time, Oracle Analytics provides capabilities for customers to bring analytics to life through compelling storytelling with infographics and data-connected presentations, and even information delivery via AI-generated news anchors using Synthesia.

Also Read: Innovating Security Operations: The Role of Generative AI

Could you please discuss Oracle’s strategy in ensuring Cloud and Analytics offerings drive customer efficiency and effectiveness? 

Oracle Analytics incorporates AI and ML to help organizations optimize their operations through automation and gain insights from their data to improve decision-making. Advanced data analytics lets organizations analyze large, complex datasets, uncovering trends and patterns through machine learning techniques, enabling better-informed decisions and more efficient operations.

Automated business insights use machine learning to generate recommendations based on an organization’s data, delivered via optimal visualizations for easy understanding, leading to faster decision-making.

Predictive modeling and forecasting let any user at an organization anticipate future trends and customer behavior, helping to identify opportunities and risks ahead of time. Augmented data ingestion, integration and preparation help streamline the data management process for accurate, reliable insights.

Augmentation and automation reduce the time and effort previously required to manually analyze data, enabling faster decision-making, and leading to more efficiency and effectiveness for our customers.

How are Oracle’s analytics solutions pivotal in supporting customers’ digital transformation journeys?

Oracle Analytics is designed to support and accelerate our customers’ digital transformation journeys by providing a comprehensive platform for data integration, data modeling, AI/ML, advanced analytics, mobile access, security, and governance. This platform can help customers integrate their analytics workflows with business processes to improve decision-making and productivity, facilitating digital transformation and moving from being data-driven to analytics-driven.

In addition, Oracle offers a range of deployment options—cloud, on-premises, and hybrid environments—to accommodate different customer needs regardless of where a customer is on their digital transformation journey.

Also Read: Top 10 Digital Transformation Trends for Cloud-Driven Organizations

Oracle strongly emphasizes security across its products. How does this commitment influence Oracle’s analytics offerings?

Oracle Analytics is purposely designed to safeguard sensitive data and manage appropriate access to such information.

With an emphasis on security, Oracle’s analytics platform fosters the safe and secure sharing of sensitive organizational data. To support this objective, Oracle incorporates various access control methods.

For instance, role-based access control enables the configuration of access privileges tied to a person’s role within an organization. This authorization mechanism restricts data exposure to only those who require such access to perform their duties. Additionally, Oracle encrypts data both in transit and at rest, which further bolsters the protection of our customers’ critical information.

Helping customers comply with various regulatory frameworks, including GDPR and HIPAA, among others, further underscores Oracle’s commitment to security. These industry standards and requirements are incorporated into our analytics offerings to help provide comprehensive protection for our customers’ sensitive data.

Customer engagement is key in today’s market. Please tell us how Oracle incorporates customer insights into its product development process.

The Oracle Analytics product team strives to maintain a strong relationship with our customers and partners through consistent and open communication. We recognize the importance of customer feedback in driving product development, and thus, we have created a vibrant community platform where customers can share their insights and suggestions. To gain direct communication with our key customers, we host regional summits on a regular basis, facilitating open dialogue and feedback exchange. These summits are held multiple times a year, providing an opportunity for us to gather valuable input directly from our customers. We are committed to putting our customers first and working closely with them to continually enhance our products and services. 

With technology evolving rapidly, it’s fascinating to see how Oracle stays ahead in analytics and cloud services. How does the company maintain its edge in such a dynamic landscape?

Oracle Analytics delivers a steady stream of updates and enhancements on a bi-monthly cadence to keep our analytics offerings ahead of the competition and put them in the hands of our customers.

We continue to invest in research and development to incorporate technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning into Oracle Analytics, enabling organizations to leverage cutting-edge innovations.

Our recent inclusion of advanced conversational capabilities powered by natural language processing, ML, and generative AI is just one example of how Oracle is leading the way. We also developed an open-data format for sharing data and visualizations with AI tools and partnered with Synthesia, a prominent AI avatar company, to capitalize on these technologies, enabling customers to deliver content in a news format as powerful as what people see in the mass media every day. 

Your insights into fostering innovation and navigating challenges in the tech industry would be greatly appreciated. Could you share some leadership perspectives on this?

Embracing agile methodologies and a culture of experimentation fosters flexibility, quick adaptation, and continuous improvement essential for innovation in the tech sector.

Teams should be encouraged to experiment with new ideas and learn from failures. We like to fail fast and fail forward. Having a diverse talent pool brings unique perspectives that help drive product improvements and new feature development. We also run internal hack-a-thons and data visualization competitions internally to foster new ideas/innovations and ways to use our products we may not have considered. Promoting these attitudes can help build a sustainable culture of innovation in the tech industry.

I’m curious about how Oracle uses its technology to help companies tackle real-world problems. If you could share any examples or case studies?

CES stops billions of bottles and cans from polluting the planet by boosting sustainability and supporting bottle and can recycling using Oracle Analytics and other cloud services.

With the support of CES and its services platform on OCI, Australia is improving its recycling record and promoting a circular economy. The services platform has supported the recycling of more than four billion containers across the country and helped refund AUD 400 million.

In Queensland, Container Exchange has stopped around 120,000 tons each year of recyclable bottles and cans going into landfill sites or the ocean.

Lastly, what strategic guidance do you provide to business leaders seeking to leverage cloud technology and analytics for growth? 

When an organization wants to use cloud technology and analytics for growth, they need to use a comprehensive approach to define objectives, assess their analytic capabilities, build talent, make analytics-driven decisions, adopt cloud technologies, transform culture, manage risks, and establish partnerships to realize analytics mastery. They should feel confident to leverage AI and ML to accelerate their organizations digital transformation. It’s important that organizations recognize that successfully leveraging analytics often depends on having the right talent—either invest in hiring individuals with relevant skills or upskill the existing workforce to meet the demands of an analytics-driven environment. 

Also Read: Revolutionizing Business Reporting with Cloud Reporting Tools

Organizations need to embrace analytics-driven decision-making by leveraging the capabilities of cloud-based analytics. Start by encouraging stakeholders across the organization to lead by example using analytics insights to inform their decisions, leading to more informed actions, improved processes, and increased operational efficiency. This success can cascade to others in the organization and start them using Oracle Analytics in their roles.

Lastly, driving growth through cloud technology and analytics to create an analytics-driven organization often necessitates a cultural shift within the organization, so it’s important to foster a culture that embraces change, data-driven decision-making, encourages innovation and promotes a customer-centric mindset.  

Thank you, Joey! That was fun and we hope to see you back on the CIO Influence’s Interview Series soon.