Workday Update

Being that Workday is announcing their Fall 2008 update today, I figured it was a s good a time as any to get this site back up and running again.  As probably the most hyped vendor in the HR space this year, they have still had impressive growth with 67 current total clients and 35 live clients.  They only have 4 clients on financials, but given how difficult it is for companies to move financials in the current strict regulatory environment, the rapid expansion in HR and less rapid sales for financials is not a surprise.  The large majority of these are on core HR and benefits, but there are a couple on payroll as well.  They also have a couple on Workday payroll, even with vendors such as ADP as partners.

The last year saw some surprises in the market.  The signing of Flextronics (a 200k employee global company) in San Jose was a steal from the grasp of SAP, and a much larger deal than anyone realized Workday was going for at the time.  While perhaps Workday would not mind more of the Fortune 500 in their list of clients, singing these contracts is quite costly, and few and far between.  Workday has still expressed that their core sweet spot will be between 5-25k employees from a marketing perspective, and I’ll wait to see how Flex goes before pronouncing that their large employer, global capabilities are really executable.  Please don’t call me cynical – after all, neither SAP or Oracle have really pulled off the global HR application yet either.  I’ve written before about Worday’s revisioning of the organization structure and its support of the matrix organization.  I’ll look to this revisioning of organization to help facilitate the potential of a single global database for an employer.

So what’s in the new release?  Well, overall, it’s a further expansion of their overall plan which rests its foundation on SaaS delivery and Web 2.0 architecture.  Their value proposition (in addition to their delivery platform) still is that their approach to HCM is more business centric than their competitors.  The first major component is a build-in BI (business intelligence) tool based on their belief that their HCM application should be a storage point for all employee data.  While they resist any implication that their HCM could be used as a fully deployed data warehouse, I assume that they have semi-engineered the table structures to accommodate multi-dimensional reporting without having to use a separate data warehouse application.  Regardless of how they have done it, it seems that integrated BI is made quite a bit easier with SaaS deployments, and this seems to follow in the footsteps of what many talent management vendors are also putting together.

The second piece is the worker spend functionality.  The ability to report on employee costs outside of total compensation which is not dependent on the availability of a financials implementation.  I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t know enough about this module, but I’m envisioning some sort of manager self service combined with shopping cart functionality that has costs rolling through based on the dynamic org structures.  I’ll believe it when I see it, but it sounds cool.

The excitement that Workday has generated over the last 2 years has been extraordinary, and not having to carry the baggage of legacy coding is certainly an advantage.  So far, quality seems to be good, and their ability to innovate in the development process is better than average.  I’ll continue to keep my eye on them in 2009.

For the time being, I’m going to continue my siesta, so have a great holiday season and I’ll look forward to writing in 2009.

-Dubs

You may have noticed

That systematicHR has been dealing with various site issues.� We finally have access to our servers again, and will be up and running as soon as possible.

Thanks!

-Dubs

Large Investments in Technology

Perhaps I’m just a nerd, but I’ve been following the developments of the Hadron Collider for a while now.  In terms of physics, there have been many theories abounding, but with the lack of ability to look into the tiniest known particles within an atom and see how they re/act, it’s quite impossible to find insights that either reinforce those theories or otherwise.  The Hadron Collider being built allows scientists to see something like 10-19 of actual size  (if memory serves me right).  Perhaps “seeing” is not quite the right term, but alt least it can record evidence occurring at that tiniest of special levels.

For now, the collider is reported to be $8 billion in cost and took 14 years to build.  Physicists around the world await the next couple of years to see what new insights it brings.  The first measurements will be simply to obtain the accuracy of the collider by remeasuring already known observed events in nature.  Then they move onto more interesting and new things.

Perhaps more on the collider and string theory next time.  I’m continuously annoyed by business executives who want data from HR in the form of real time dashboards and analytics, but are not willing to spend the cash or time that is necessary to build them.  Lets face it, tying together a HRMS solution, bringing in multiple countries on disparate HRMS data sources, then getting all of your talent applications and even financial metrics pumped into a single data warehouse is very difficult.  You have all sorts of timing issues, data scrub issues, and that’s before you even get to standardizing data definitions and creating facts and dimensions.

So HR sits around with nice little observable facts like turnover reports.  Ohh… Ahh…  Don’t I really want to know about turnover in my populations that contribute most to the business’s overall growth or profitability?  And even within that employee segment, how about the highest performers?  And within that, how about breaking it down by competencies?  And the other 100 ways to slice the data that you just can’t see on an Excel spreadsheet.  But you need a OLAP tool to slice and dice to your heart’s content.

Data Warehouse and analytics technologies can be expensive.  Sure, every software vendor says they deliver a reporting and analytics tool, but if it’s not sitting outside the software and allowing the convergence of multiple data sources within a standardized set of definitional parameters, it’s not doing what you or your business leaders need it to do.

Perhaps this post is mis-timed.  HR budgets might be feeling the pinch, but as our talent fortunes rise, we simply can’t move to the next level of insights without these analytics.  At some point, we’re going to have to spend the money and time to develop the warehouse.  I’ve seen thing happen in a year within a couple $M or over 3-4 years and $10M depending on the scale and complexity of the organization.  But the reality of the situation is that we’re putting in great automation technologies tile talent and self service, but still not delivering on the insights.  Don’t be afraid to ask for money – we’ll have to at some point.