GQR Highlights: Workday? Rising 2019

At Workday? Rising 2019, the Workday? community came to life over four days making new connections, learning how to overcome business challenges, and discovering on how Workday? and its partners help lead businesses to a bright future. The premier event brought current and prospective customers, press, analysts, Workday? leaders and valued partners together for a unique opportunity to share knowledge, insight and experience.

During the event, GQR’s global Workday? team of 12, hosted a happy hour offsite at Yard House for fellow Workday? users to celebrate Workday? Rising, which was a total success!

In its typical impressive style, the variety of Partner Booths, Braindate breakout zones and sessions, Learning sessions, Customer Reference Conversations, Welcome Keynotes, Industry Related Keynotes, Workday Labs and all surrounded with an abundance of enticing gifts, merchandise and fun themes, There has been something for everyone.

Puppies through to branded t shirts, Corporate head shot photos and enough stationery and peripherals to stave a visit to Staples until the next Rising in 2020 in San Francisco.

So what did we learn this year and what does Workday in 2019/2020 and beyond have in store for the mountain of prospects, and existing customers. Let’s find out!

A hot topic at Workday? rising was on how machine learning is the key to a changing world, Workday unveiled a big move to harness machine learning with and new automation tools for finance teams, personalized user experience in its people tools, a new talent mobility offering based on a skills graph and a blockchain-based system for automatically verifying credentials.

The opening keynote speaker Aneel Bhusri, CEO and co-founder of Workday?, reiterated his view that adoption of machine learning is becoming an existential imperative for enterprises. He said, “It's very clear that this is the way the world's headed. Machine learning will automate tasks and save time. “If you don't embrace it as a company, I believe your companies will be left in the dust; this is such an important technology. If your competitor's using machine learning to make better business decisions, better product decisions, moving faster, and if you're not, you're going to have a hard time competing.”

In a swift, one-hour keynote ensembled with pre-recorded customer testimonials on video and colleagues who proceeded to explain how the new machine learning capabilities built into Workday's? forthcoming products would help save its customers from that possibility of not being competitive.

Big Data and Machine Learning in Finance and HR

Several announcements bring the best of Workday's? big data analytics platform and Prism Analytics, into its core applications to help automate repetitive processes.

? Workday? Accounting Center is based on an accounting rules engine that will automatically post operational transactions from third party applications such as loan origination or claim systems into the GL as journals. Reports and analysis can be run with full access to associated data from the external system.

? Discovery Boards will be made freely available to both Financials and HCM customers. This drag-and-drop data discovery capability makes it easy to create reports. Early adopters report that it cuts the amount of time it takes to create a report by three quarters, says Pete Schlampp, General Manager of Workday? Analytics.

? Several traditionally labor-intensive processes in finance are automated using machine learning, including supplier invoice automation, applying OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to identify data in expenses submitted via Slack, or detecting anomalies in accounting entries as they occur.

? New features in Adaptive Insights use machine learning to catch potential data entry errors in plans. There's also deeper integration with Adaptive Insights, allowing the publication of budget plans direct to Workday? Financials, or the automatic creation of open positions in Workday HCM once headcount budgets are approved. Planning has also been boosted by new elastic Hyper-cube infrastructure so that analysis can scale to match the needs of Workday's? larger customers. Elastic Hypercube Technology is Intelligent, scalable, and flexible to model, analyse, and report without compromise. The core of their platform, the patent-pending Elastic Hypercube Technology is the in-memory engine that delivers the power and performance you will need, when you need it. Model, report, and analyse at any scale and complexity.

Here is how:

Intelligent: Knows What It Needs To Calculate – And Only Calculates That

With their fine-grained understanding of model dependencies, Adaptive Insights built Elastic Hypercube Technology to speed results for even the largest and most complex models with the intelligence to only calculate changes when needed. You don’t have to wait for the whole model to recalculate all over again. They don’t waste memory and calculation cycles on unneeded cells. Instead, their efficient dynamic caching eliminates the cell bloat that plagues traditional systems, enabling rapid calculations on multidimensional models of virtually unlimited size.

Scalable: Adds Memory And Computing Power When You Need It

Elastic Hypercube Technology not only efficiently calculates complex models, it elastically adds memory and computes power when needed to calculate model elements in parallel. That’s dynamic, automatic scaling. It means you can compare as many scenarios as you want, at the same time, without sacrificing performance.

Flexible: Lets You Model What You Want And Analyse Freely.

Model the way you think about your business through tabular models and views for workforce and cube views for revenue planning. Offering ways to report and analyse freely without any cumbersome setup or additional reporting cubes.

·     Workday? People Analytics builds on Prism to deliver insights from data using natural language. A similar capability is in the works for Financials.

People Experience And Skills Graph

A new adaptive user experience in Workday? HCM called “People Experience” uses machine learning to personalise what a user sees at any time, and which learns from interactions to improve the accuracy and relevance of the experience over time. It provides contextualised information, including guidance in career development and personalised content.

There is also a digital assistant that provides answers to questions directly from an integrated knowledge base or can create tickets in a built-in case management system.

Building on the UX can also be accessed from within Slack or Microsoft Teams. I attended an Insightful presentation by Pete Kumar (great to finally meet you) from Fitbit on Wednesday, a key member of the early adoptors and innovation services pilot team on the customer enablement side for Workday? for Slack IX personalisation and augmented analytics using machine learning.

There is a big focus on providing help and assistance in the form of punchy video clips.

Two new applications build on a skills graph that Workday? has been building out over the past few years. Skills Insights is a new feature in Workday HCM that allows HR managers evaluate the skills they have available within their organisation and what gaps exist.

A second application, “Talent Marketplace”, facilitates internal mobility by matching employee skills gaps and interests with potential opportunities within the organisation. At launch the application supports temporary assignments to internal projects, with plans to extend it in the future to add internal job transfers and connections into external talent communities.

Workday Credentials

Workday? has also introduced Workday? Credentials, initially only available to Rising attendees, a blockchain-based platform for automating the validation of an individual's credentials such as their qualifications and experience. Workday? customers can now use the platform to issue credentials to employees, enabling validation of their qualifications, identity and experience. When moving to another employer who uses the same platform, individuals will be able to have those credentials automatically validated.

Wayto

Workday? launched the “Wayto” application, which gives individuals control over who can access their credentials. All Rising attendees were able to download and try out the app, with their Rising attendance as their first credential. This is interesting as it is Workday's? first venture into a consumer application. It already has 13,000 +users and a potential user base of 40 million in the Workday? ecosystem.

The keynote ended with Emily McEvilly, SVP Global Customer Services, announcing new initiatives to help customers "build this new muscle of continuous adoption" so that they can get the most out of their Workday? instances. She spoke about new templates and customer configuration in the Customer Central portal to help jumpstart productive adoption.

She also revealed a new offering of Workday? Success Plans, which will help customers map a path towards achieving their goals with Workday?. This is a response to customers feeling they're not keeping up with the functionality Workday? has to offer:

“No matter how skilled your team is we've heard that sometimes you may need help and keeping up with all the innovations that we're delivering ..."

We all know and agree that change is hard, but your chosen implementation partners do or Workday? will be there to support you at every step of your journey in a way that makes the most sense for your organization and your people.”

The partnership is a two-way street. Workday?, commit to delivering innovative products and services to help you thrive in this changing world, they continue to Invest an acclaimed 30% of revenues into R&D against an indicated 15% by competitors. Furthermore, Customer experience continues at an impressive 97%.

There was a huge amount of detail to absorb and digest this week, Workday?-elaborated further in product keynotes throughout the week— but the overall message was delivered swiftly and effectively. The format made for a well-paced keynote that covered a lot of ground in just over an hour. It was good to see several customers validating the messages, but they were all brought on as video clips which helped maintain the pace.

It's no accident that the keynote ended with a pitch for services to help customers adjust more rapidly to what's coming down in the very near future. Workday? is going to have to work hard to bring its customers along this path it has mapped out for them. It is steering them towards the future at a much faster pace than We have seen from other enterprise application vendors.

And so, after the mandatory Customer appreciation Parties, thank you once again to Kainos, PWC, OneSource Virtual, Collaborative Solutions, we were able to have some downtime and celebrate a healthy 2019.

See you next month in Milan! Find out what else to expect at Workday? Rising and about our solutions, here.