First Take - Top 3 Takeaways of Workday Rising Day 1 Keynote - The dawn of the Analytics era - time to deliver Insight Apps

• It’s all about Analytics - Back in January Workday acquired Identified (my blog post is here), which was largely seen as an acquihire. 10 months later we see the biggest pitch for Analytics delivered by a major (non analytical per se) vendor this year. Aneel Bushri expanded the so far cloud and mobile DNA picture of Workday with the addition of (analytical) Insights. And these analytics products were part of both Dave Duffield’s and Bushri’s keynote parts, had a lot of stage time with Dan Beck and Ademey Ajao and were prominent in the respective product areas of both Leighanne Levensaler (HCM) and Betsy Bland (Finance). Workday showed analytical capabilities to predict retention risk, enable better Succession Management and likely Expense Deviations.
  Given the audience was mixed technical and business it was no surprise that Workday did not go down  more into the details than mentioning Identified’s SYMAN, and the power of ‘data science and machine learning’. It would have been good to open the ‘Pandora Box’ a little more in regards of the analytical algorithms Workday plans to use - while Workday gave ample room to data ontologies around the by now ‘famous’ nurse example.

  The six Workday Insight Apps coming in Workday 24 and 25

  But kudos go to Workday to frame analytical apps first in the industry in a major keynote - a good move. But the road seems to be long with the Insight Apps (as Workday calls them) almost a year out, slated for Workday 25. And Analytics was so prominent, other new functionality took a backseat in the HCM and Financials areas. But then I did not have a chance to attend follow up sessions due to travel schedules and my impressions and takeaways are strictly limited to the keynote.

The Career Path Recommendations Insight App demo

• Student Roadmap - Duffield updated the audience on the Workday Student roadmap, and credit goes to Workday to share a long running roadmap all the way to 2017 with Workday 28. In a nutshell 2015 will see Admissions and Curriculum Management, 2016 will see the launch of more Financial centered offerings with Financial Aid, Student Records and Academic Advising and finally 2017 will see Student Financials. Offering longer term roadmap is something we generally applaud at Constellation Research, as it gives customers and prospects the opportunity to align roll out priorities and plans, so a good move that we would like to see in the Financials and HCM areas as well. And finally we will need to check with Workday for similar roadmaps for the other key verticals of Workday.

The Workday Student Roadmap

• UI innovation remains in full swing - It’s less than a year ago that Workday released a brand new user interface. With the current innovation rate happening in the user interface space, time is flying (as we noted in our takeaways of Workday Tech Summit here) - so it is good to see that Workday not only keeps improving the overall UI, but release innovations continuously and in this case immediately. The new Org Chart UI mechanics, always a tricky area of user interface design, will ship immediately to the customer’s sandboxes. A powerful proof point for the cloud delivery and it is good to see that Workday - probably enabled also by the one code line release model - can deliver innovations continuously. I didn’t have a chance to play with the new org chart control, but the first impression of how it was demoed in the keynote was that it may be too scroll intensive. But then a lot of web (site) design becomes pretty scroll intensive these days and Workday maybe walking the walk of time. The other major change is coming in the Notifications area, an equally tricky user interface area.

The new Org Chart

Tidbits

• Good Housekeeping on the HR side - A lot of ‘Tools for you’ got announced by Leighanne Levensaler, like Mass Changes, Mass Actions, Data Purging etc. - which are a sign of Workday looking at customer productivity beyond the individual user, so for the HR professional. Not a surprise, but a typical priority a few quarters after a user interface upgrade. On the functional side it’s also no surprise that aiding the new Recruiting module (launch covered here) is a new Insight App for the HCM area. The other three Insights Apps for HR are Retention Risk (there is a need to de-dupe how that works with the existing flight risk functionality), Career Path Recommendations (demoed) and Workforce Scorecards. Equally very well received - applause by audience - was the commitment to support local, state, province tax elections and an effective change stack for payroll integration. Definitively an area we need to learn more about given Workday’s dependency on partners for many payroll implementations.

Employee Retention Insight App

• Finance goes global and more - On the Financials side Workday is doing a good job and listening to customers with the addition of Document Sequencing (Workday 24) and pre-packaged Localizations (Workday 25). And on the Insight Apps side there will be analytical applications for Financial Scorecards, Customer Collections and Employee Expense Deviation.

Expense Deviation Insight App

• Inventory Management !? - To my surprise we saw Workday announcing Inventory Management. We can imagine that e.g. Healthcare customers may be demanding functionality in this area - but it is a first move by Workday outside the so far declared functional realm of Financials and HR (adopting to the sequence switch that Workday has undertaken). Certainly an area to watch, and as certain is that Workday executives will staunchly deny any move into Supply Chain Management.

MyPOV