Chapter Contents
CHAPTER 1
Workday: Delivering Confidence for Your Organization’s Future
Two visionaries walk into a diner…
On an ordinary day in 2005, visionaries and longtime friends Aneel Bhusri and Dave Duffield met at the Jax at the Tracks diner in Truckee, California, near Lake Tahoe. They decided to form a start-up—one that would revolutionize the enterprise software market. They wanted to sell cloud-based applications for HR and finance—and they had plenty of experience to back it up. Dave had founded PeopleSoft in 1987 and served as the company’s CEO and chairman of the board. Aneel had held several leadership positions at PeopleSoft, including senior vice president of product strategy. Together, they embarked on their quest to build an intuitive, intelligent, and continuously up-to-date platform for HR, finance, and planning in the cloud. The result was Workday.
CHAPTER 1
Workday: AI that illuminates the future of work.
Two visionaries walk into a diner...
On an ordinary day in 2005, visionaries and longtime friends Aneel Bhusri and Dave Duffield met at the Jax at the Tracks diner in Truckee, California, near Lake Tahoe. They decided to form a start-up—one that would revolutionize the enterprise software market. They wanted to sell cloud-based applications for HR and finance—and they had plenty of experience to back it up. Dave had founded PeopleSoft in 1987, and served as the company’s CEO and chairman of the board. Aneel had held several leadership positions at PeopleSoft, including senior vice president of product strategy. Together, they embarked on their quest to build an intuitive, intelligent, and continuously up-to-date platform for HR, finance, and planning in the cloud. The result was Workday.
Go from working with AI, to AI working for you.
At Workday, our technology is built with your organization’s success in mind. We help you work through the challenges—the ones you’re facing today and the ones you’ll face tomorrow. With AI at its core, our open and connected technology provides the flexibility, extensibility, and security you need to confidently adapt to continuous change and propel your organization forever forward.
We designed the Workday platform for the cloud and to provide continuous innovation and adaptability without disrupting your business with the forced downtime that comes with complex, ongoing upgrades. In addition, our unique object data model offers real-time access to all your financial and people data for always-accurate, secure transactions and strategic insights.
For more than a decade Workday has embraced AI, and today our embedded AI called Workday Illuminate™ uniquely positions us to lead the transformation of work and drive innovation by empowering your employees to focus on what matters most: managing your people and your finances.
The powerful security model in Workday gives you confidence in your data’s accuracy, privacy, and security, enabling faster decision-making and ensuring that your business and people are protected. And Workday empowers your employees with efficiency and maximum performance, every time. Confidence is one reason why Workday is the trusted AI platform for more than 10,500 organizations around the world ready to supercharge work and drive extraordinary results.
Maximize your technology investment.
Here’s an overview of what’s covered in this eBook.
CHAPTER 2
The Workday platform architecture.
The Workday object data model provides continuous and real-time access to all your financial and people data so you can make bold moves with confidence. Connected data delivers ongoing value by empowering you to:
- Deliver up-to-date data for reports and dashboards with ease
- Scale and provide updates to colleagues efficiently
- Support external data alongside your Workday data
- Accelerate application development and deployment
CHAPTER 3
Workday Illuminate™: Transform work with AI.
Delivering measurable value through our next generation of AI, Illuminate and our innovation strategy take a thoughtful, safe, and responsible approach to AI focused on practical principles, including:
- Delivering AI at scale to all customers simultaneously
- Building AI for every customer—regardless of language or region—without upgrades, new implementation, or add-on costs
- Unlocking new ideas and driving measurable AI value to every user, executive, and employee alike
- Taking a practical approach to innovation and delivering on what we say
- Using AI in an ethical, responsible, and safe manner
CHAPTER 4
Enhancing the Workday experience with AI.
Our reimagined user experience (UX) boosts employee experience and satisfaction and supercharges productivity through seamless, intuitive actions to help your employees work smarter, not harder. With Workday, personalized UX makes a difference by:
- Leveraging AI to provide easy access to information, tasks, and insights so users can find exactly what they need, when they need it
- Providing a UX that leverages commonly used technology and design patterns so the user experience is not just modern but also user-friendly
- Simplifying and automating complex tasks with AI-enhanced assistance so employees can focus on high-value work
- Meeting employees in their daily workflow with integrations to Microsoft Teams, Slack, and the Workday mobile app—making every workspace a powerhouse of productivity
- Bringing third-party applications directly into the Workday UI to create a single secure and seamless experience for employees, reducing complexity and lowering overall costs
CHAPTER 5
Workday security, privacy, and compliance: Protecting your enterprise data.
Workday understands that security and reliability are about more than protecting your business—they’re also about protecting your people. We apply rigorous safeguards across our people, processes, and technology to protect your data and ensure our applications and infrastructure remain safe and resilient. With the powerful Workday security model, you can:
- Protect your data—control access to it, see every access attempt, and log every data change
- Reduce your regulatory risk with data encryption and data privacy tools
- Personalize privacy features to fit your use case, business, and industry
CHAPTER 6
Workday Extend, integrations, and more: Build agile solutions.
With Workday, organizations can address their unique circumstances by extending capabilities and building new applications that run natively in Workday. With Workday Extend and Workday integrations, you can consolidate your application portfolio, respond rapidly to unplanned events, and build personalized programs. Specifically, you can:
- Confidently build and deploy innovative and bespoke applications on the Workday platform—leveraging our trusted data model, business process framework, UX, and consistent security
- Quickly build new capabilities with no- and low-code interoperability and app development resources
- Tap into APIs and integration tools to easily connect systems within Workday and with your broader ecosystem
- Build intelligent and responsible apps that leverage the power of Workday Illuminate with the Workday AI Gateway
CHAPTER 7
Workday partners: Working better together.
Fueled by innovation and industry expertise, our partner ecosystem Workday Marketplace can help your organization unlock new opportunities to drive growth with Workday. We collaborate with hundreds of experts who share our dedication to helping you succeed, no matter what’s ahead. Our partners work alongside Workday, developing the new apps, integrations, and packaged solutions that run natively on the Workday platform. So you get all the same benefits of Workday-developed applications and can confidently embrace the power of collective innovation.
The Workday technical design philosophy and implementation.
Legacy systems and applications, whether on-premise or a “lift-and-shift,” follow a traditional architectural approach that frequently results in technical debt by binding the application logic to specific technologies. As a result, these rigid applications can’t take advantage of new technology innovations without a substantial rewrite.
Workday takes a different approach. Using metadata, we’ve created an abstraction layer between our technology and application logic so we can constantly evolve the technology and the application logic independent of each other. We don’t have to rewrite the application logic to catch up with shifts in technology. And on the other side, the application logic can evolve without having to unwind its underlying technology or user interface.
Our design philosophy also has implications for security and privacy, where our practices of “privacy by design” ensure that security is built in from the start—not bolted on. System updates default to the most secure approach.
Because Workday was designed to evolve, we’ve quickly taken advantage of advanced and emerging technologies such as native mobile platform technologies, hyperscale cloud infrastructure, and AI, including Gen AI. And we do this without disrupting our customers’ operations. There’s no need to redeploy, purchase a new version of Workday, or do anything other than continue moving forever forward, together.
The Workday approach to development.
The old way vs. the Workday way.
In the past when businesses needed new capabilities or realized their systems were noticeably out of date, they would embark on an upgrade campaign, often through a disruptive upgrade or migration project. The promise at the other end of the update really had to be worth the resulting operational disruption. The Workday true cloud architecture eliminates this perennial challenge. Customers are no longer required to balance the difficulty of an upgrade with the gain of new capabilities. They just get the new capabilities, every release, without requesting or waiting.
We deliver innovation to our customers quickly, pragmatically, and seamlessly. We progressively roll out changes and features in a sensible manner to enhance the customer experience while avoiding regressions. With small, automatic, incremental updates, no one bats an eye. There’s no chaos. And no disruption.
Workday delivers continuous innovation.
From the start, we committed to an agile development process based on continuous integration and extensive functional, performance, and security test automation. And we build our services to intelligently assess the risks and benefits of making changes.
Ongoing enhancements and twice-yearly updates.
At Workday, our goal is to deliver functionality at a rapid pace to provide you with the enhancements you need. We deliver product features and services in two ways:
1. Weekly service updates. These updates occur within the weekend maintenance window and deliver timely fixes and improvements that are less impactful to you. You choose when to opt in or uptake.
2. Feature releases. These releases are delivered semiannually and include net-new features, enhancements to existing functionality, new web services or updates to existing web services, payroll compliance updates, bug fixes, and new products.
Once a feature has passed through the test pipeline, it’s checked into the production codeline. Software switches called toggles are used to determine whether each feature is viewable only to development, to customers in their preview tenant, or to customers in production.
Tenant lifecycle management.
Workday tenant lifecycle management provides customers with many benefits. Although customers have always had their own production tenant—the live Workday tenant used at their organization every day—they also have a sandbox tenant where they can test reconfigurations and newly developed product features using a copy of their own data. In addition to encouraging a more fruitful customer-Workday feedback loop, this gives customers time to prepare training and job aids before new features become available in production.
One benefit of the preview tenant is that customers can review and test new features using their own data and decide when to move these features into their production tenant. And twice a year, we have a major release where all new features provided in the preview tenant are moved to production for all customers. It’s important to note that new features arrive disabled by default so customers can innovate at their desired speed and decide when it’s the right time to adopt a new capability.
The preview tenant (combined with our continuous development model) also enables Workday to be more responsive to government regulations and compliance. We can make updates to support new and changing laws in the preview tenant and verify the updates with customers, and then seamlessly turn those changes on in production.
Customers can also leverage additional implementation tenants that will mirror their current production environment. These tenants provide greater flexibility for special projects and scenario modeling and can be refreshed on the customer’s desired time frame.
Feature rules and other approaches to deployment.
Our carefully defined feature rules help us decide when an off-cycle feature should go into preview or production. Some changes are potentially impactful or highly visible, so we might prefer to deliver them in our twice-yearly formal update. These changes may require our customers to dedicate time to assessing change impact, reviewing, and preparing, but fewer updates means less time spent each year on such preparation.
We’ve also invested significantly in automated background conversion technology so we can update customer data to match changes in the object data models—without impacting the customer. This approach dramatically changes the work our environments and infrastructure teams perform on the day of an update for the better. Instead of moving to a new codeline and running conversion processes for all customers on a single day, an update involves simply switching the new features from preview mode to production mode. This enables us to incrementally deliver features to all our customers with minimal disruption. We can also deliver updates quickly—typically, we update all of our customers in under two hours. And we continue to invest in processes that will reduce downtime even further.
All of these deployment tactics mean that an update in Workday is less of a technical big-bang and more of a welcome party for familiar features from a customer’s preview tenants.
The Workday architecture.
We’ve designed our architecture to be remarkably flexible to accommodate the constantly innovating world of technology, the growth of our customer base, and increasing regulatory changes—without disruption to our customers. At the same time, we’re focused on continually delivering a superior user experience in the face of rapidly evolving business requirements. To that end, we purposefully kept the different layers of our architecture insulated from each other so a change in one layer would not require a change in another. Let’s read on and take a closer look at what that means and how it allows you to flex with the future.
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