Tough Love: How BG Group's HR boss binned SAP and passed over Workday to embrace Oracle HCM

So much gas, so little time

If BG Group still retains some of the bad habits it may have picked up as a bloated public sector remnant of a UK government past, there are certainly people at the firm doing their best to sort it out.

Luci Love, who had no background in either HR or IT, rose to the position of head of HR shared services just two years ago in 2012, and set her main goal as weeding out and overhauling a hugely incumbent IT system. This proved unfortunate for SAP, but more profitable for its long-time rival Oracle, as the company's Cloud HCM product was chosen to bust some serious heads.

Speaking on a customer panel at Oracle's Open World conference, Love explained to delegates how having "grown up quite rapidly over the past decade", BG Group had "customised the living daylights out of every piece of technology [it] had".

More worryingly, this "myriad of independent applications" was only running at around 20 per cent of the capacity it could be.

Sitting down with Computing after the session, Love gets seriously metaphorical.

"I've described it a bit like, you know when you're in an earthquake zone and you have a human chain to move the rubble - that was our approach to systems. It was just survival," says Love.

"It was really a case that we'd taken SAP and over-engineered it to the point where we couldn't upgrade, so then we had a 10-year-old version that was massively customised, and you would pull a piece of string over here and something would fall over over there, and it was just really, really difficult to manage."

Adding diplomatically that she's "sure it's a very great tool when used properly", Love explained that looking at the German giant's offerings at the time just wasn't floating BG Group's boat.

"We asked ourselves whether we should just do a reimplementation, but SAP had just bought SuccessFactors [an HCM start-up], they were going through what can be only be described as a forced marriage, and that was quite tricky. They were working out all of the stuff that needed to be sorted, and as a customer it felt quite difficult we were exposed to that," she explains.

Love adds that while SAP is still very much a strategic partner for BG Group, particularly in its role as the core platform for finance and procurement, Oracle offered something more in line with HR's specific requirements.

Working for a company with employees strewn across the globe in 20 countries as far-flung as the Kazakh Steppe, Honduras and Tanzania, Love was becoming interested in a serious piece of SaaS cloud.

"Five years between refreshes was killing us," she explains. "We needed something that could keep pace with the organisation, and just crazy things like matrix management, so we were looking to address all these issues we had. I was confident that SAP could fix today's and yesterday's problems, but maybe not tomorrow's."

Oracle, reveals Love, persuaded her to be less "obsessive" about the design process, because it could be iterative, and if it wasn't quite working, things could adapt and change.

While not quite off-the-shelf, Love believes that Oracle HCM's adaptable structure, coupled with an ongoing development partnership she describes as a "pleasure", very quickly gave Oracle the edge. She seems almost proud of describing her £11.9bn turnover company as unusually hard to please.

"Cultural fit is important to us," says Love. "We're quite a tricky organisation to deal with - we're used to signing very long-term contracts, and therefore we're quite particular about the terms and conditions we'll sign up to. For instance, I really enjoyed dealing with Workday as an organisation, but didn't feel they had the flexibility in terms of the contractual piece."

Gearing up to move from the heavily-customised SAP ERP system to an on-premise cloud, Love explains how BG Group looked at Workday and realised "we couldn't brand it, and we couldn't make it look like a BG system".

Worse, the contract seemed just as restrictive as the UI. "It felt a little like iTunes - ‘click Ts&Cs here: do you want it or not?', and it wasn't going to work from a cultural standpoint," she says.

In comparison, Love describes meetings with Oracle that left her feeling that there was "a real commitment to helping me be successful".

"I'd say to anyone that the reason you should choose Oracle is because of their partnering. They have helped me get by the issues. And there have been issues, particularly with product maturity [Love had earlier described installing any new system as 'like childbirth - it's really quite painful, but you soon forget'], but where we've had them, Oracle's moved heaven and earth to get us by."

Love says she expected Oracle to fulfil about half of its commitments.

"'If I get that, I'll be happy,' I thought, but I must have got 150 per cent of what they promised me in the end. So they were great, and they continued to be. The resources they've given us have been fantastic."

The proof, though, is in the pudding, and despite a punishing schedule Love's implementation story is undeniably impressive.

"We started in April 2013, and we did the full global design in eight weeks," Love told delegates.

"We were live with the core HR system for 20 countries in six months, a month after that we did employee and manager self-service, and three months after that, we were running with computational cycle and goals. Another three months, and we had recruitment, and we're now at a phase where we were live across the piece in July."

Oracle Cloud HCM has since helped Love get to grips with some worryingly rudimentary issues, such as knowing how many people actually work at BG Group.

"We're now seeing focus on the analytics phase. Before, we couldn't even agree with finance on what headcount was, but now not only do we have a consistent number on headcount, we can split it in ways that are meaningful to the organisation," says Love.

"And actually a lot of that is now automated. A lot of my business case was built on saving people from running lots of reports - Excel jockeys, basically, trying to make some sense and gain some insight."

Further, Love enjoys "constantly scouring the release notes" to see what's coming next.

Although Love currently has no plans to expand BG Group's involvement with Oracle into other areas beyond this platform, she is enthused by what Release 12 can do.

"One of the things they were showing us was how employees of the future will be able to link their Facebook accounts into their work life," says Love.

"People of my generation would ask ‘Why the hell would you do that?' but I was talking to an analyst recently and he said ‘Well if you hire a person because they can speak French, they need to be able to do that in their job, and it's the same with people who have skills in social media - merging the work and personal allows people those resources.'"

A self-confessed "digital immigrant", Love describes how her one attempt at using Twitter resulted in striking up a conversation with American football player Aaron Hernandez, who subsequently was arrested on accusation of multiple murders.

But while she may not "get" Twitter, Love uses the experience to illustrate how she doesn't believe that an HR boss's personal technical knowledge should prove an impediment to using IT to nourish a workplace which, very soon, will have to play host to four generations of employees.

"Left to our own devices [at BG Group], it would be 2050 before we took an interest in gamification, but with Oracle starting to build in that functionality now, we're playing questions in our head like, ‘How would we use that?' and then there's policy questions - the ability to plug your FitBit into your profile, for instance. We take health and safety really seriously, so that would be a really good fit for us. But we'd never think of that without Oracle. 2050 is generous, in fact - it would be even further along!"

While it still brings to mind the enforced exercise regimes of Orwellian nightmare fiction, Computing concedes the point that fitter is better, before reaching for another glazed donut, but luckily Love isn't keen to hammer these ideas through as quickly as she did the general infrastructure.

"My CIO calls this stuff bleeding-edge technology, but I don't think we necessarily want to be at the forefront of these things, or be an early adopter. "I'd rather see what happens to the market, and see how the next generation responds to it first."

If Larry Ellison really is putting his billions into searching for the secret of immortality, BG Group might find the contents of Release 13 very interesting indeed. It'll certainly beat a communal fruit bowl and 20 squats a day logged to the cloud.