Overview
OCI was maturing — growing out of the adolescence phase and into a productive, profitable side of Oracle. The days when an employee could spin up a resource for tests and walk away needed to be more closely monitored. Abandoned services on tenancies weren't producing anymore, but they were still a draw on the company. A new, mature approach to financial operations was needed.
The Opportunity
Much like the Council of Elrond (with much less magnificent beards), a work study including every major service that could benefit from a financial overview was called. The group split into three working teams, each with their own UX researcher, UX designer, and OCI service partners. Two questions guided the work: "How might we define ownership of a tenancy to enable reporting by the org?" and "How might we provide a budget burndown so owners can see how they're tracking?" The Cost of Cloud Council was formed.
Being the UX light in the Cost of Cloud cave
I was assigned UX lead in one of the three workgroups. My job was to document the requests and observations that surfaced — and importantly, to be a passive observer, letting the UX researcher guide the group exercises so I didn't influence the wants and needs of the room.
From there, the task was to take that valuable raw information and condense it into actionable items. I sorted it into two categories — navigation locations and features — and used the navigation points to sketch a brief outline of what a new FinOps service might look like.
Compiling the service structure
Next, I aligned the loose wireframe to the goals we'd defined for the product. Working with the project manager, we landed on four pillars: Understanding Usage & Costs, Usage Optimization, Price Optimization, and Organizational Alignment. I created a chart to make where we were headed legible to everyone.
Iterating on the steps for activation
With buy-in from the Cost of Cloud members on what the service needed to do, we started iterating on the steps required to turn the service on. The net-new piece was a monitoring dashboard where users could see what they were spending and where — but to gather that information, we first had to activate monitoring on each service.
Upper management interest
Word of the workshop and the emerging product was making the rounds. Upper management asked for a demo and were delighted by what we'd put together. Because we leaned heavily on existing services, we only needed to build the new dashboard — and once monitoring was set up, a wealth of new insights opened up to tenancy owners, internal and external alike.
Cloud World Debut
Cost of Cloud was a success, and leadership saw the potential to feature it at Oracle Cloud World. It demonstrated that OCI cared about its customers — surfacing superfluous spend and idle resources — and because the same tool worked internally, the savings we were offering customers were available to the company too. Finding abandoned tenancies and non-performing resources meant they could be reallocated to the resource pool, lowering the cost of doing business.
The business impact
After the workshop, our goals were clear. We needed to:
- Enhance visibility, visualization, and optimization
- Develop a modular approach aligned with diverse user groups
- Craft solutions for shared cost efficiency
- Enhance data integration and management
By taking a modular approach and repurposing an existing product, we used the tags system and guided-journey patterns to surface cost efficiency and optimization recommendations with very little new infrastructure. AI-powered enhancements remain a clear next step.
