Chapter Contents
Chapter 2 Highlights: The Workday Platform Architecture
Chapter 3 Highlights: Workday Illuminate™: Transform Work with AI
Chapter 4 Highlights: Enhancing the Workday Experience with AI
Chapter 5 Highlights: Workday Security, Privacy, and Compliance: Protecting Your Enterprise Data
Chapter 6 Highlights: Workday Extend, Integrations, and More: Build Agile Solutions
Chapter 7 Highlights: Workday Partners: Working Better Together
CHAPTER 8
Unlock the power of Workday to stay ahead of change.
As you’ve noticed throughout this eBook, our Workday architecture has evolved significantly since the company was founded in 2005. Twenty years later, Workday is still instilled with the principles it was built on: to help businesses innovate, challenge and inspire talent, and unlock possibilities to stay ahead of change—faster than ever.
While staying true to our mission for two decades—and by talking with and listening to Workday customers and developers—we’ve refreshed longtime services, extended our technology platform with new extensibility capabilities, and adopted new technologies, like AI at scale. It’s how we make the most of your technology investment. It’s also how we deliver new experiences and functionality to our customers, while maintaining the high performance of Workday itself—and every application interacting with it.
We hope this eBook has inspired you to explore new directions for how your business uses Workday. To wrap things up, here are our takeaways for using Workday to the max—check each chapter to review the details.
CHAPTER 8
Unlock the power of Workday to stay ahead of change.
As you’ve noticed throughout this eBook, our Workday architecture has evolved significantly since the company was founded in 2005. Twenty years later, Workday is still instilled with the principles it was built on: to help businesses innovate, challenge and inspire talent, and unlock possibilities to stay ahead of change—faster than ever.
While staying true to our mission for two decades—and by talking with and listening to Workday customers and developers—we’ve refreshed longtime services, extended our technology platform with new extensibility capabilities, and adopted new technologies, such as AI, at scale. It’s how we make the most of your technology investment. It’s also how we deliver new experiences and functionality to our customers while maintaining the high performance of Workday itself—and every application interacting with it.
We hope this eBook has inspired you to explore new directions for how your business uses Workday. To wrap things up, here are our takeaways for using Workday to the max—check each chapter to review the details.
Chapter 2 highlights: The Workday platform architecture.
From the beginning, the Workday architecture was built to be flexible enough to accommodate the constantly changing world of technology—while ensuring a superior customer experience despite rapidly evolving business and technology requirements.
Here’s how we do it:
We keep the layers of our architecture insulated from each other so a change in one layer does not require a change in another
We created a metadata abstraction layer to simplify development—a language we call XpressO
We have built out a public cloud platform to be more robust and flexible, minimizing downtime and scaling to meet customer needs
Chapter 3 highlights: Workday Illuminate™— transform work with AI.
Through a thoughtful, proactive, and responsible approach to AI, Workday Illuminate™ makes AI available for adoption and use throughout your key business processes and daily workstreams. As AI continues to mature, we’ll expand and evolve our AI strategy by:
- Combining machine learning and Gen AI to automate existing manual processes and simplify how work gets done inside of Workday
- Transforming traditional business processes using AI agents to transcend simple task completion
- Using a thoughtful approach to engineering that keeps your data secure without compromising the value and effectiveness of enterprise AI
- Building AI into the core of the platform, allowing AI solutions to be securely built, tested, and delivered across HR, finance, and procurement use cases
- Innovating with AI in a responsible and intelligent way, ensuring customers are positioned for long-term benefits while minimizing risk
Chapter 4 highlights: Enhancing the Workday experience with AI.
Our user experiences, powered by Workday Illuminate, unlock productivity and reduce complexity for employees and managers.
AI-enhanced Workday Assistant uses natural language to help employees find the task and information they’re looking for, significantly reducing the time spent searching for answers and also decreasing the volume of HR support tickets.
Workday Guidance provides step-by-step instructions to help people complete tasks in record time.
To simplify workflows and minimize context-switching, Workday Everywhere brings everyday HR tasks and information seamlessly into popular collaboration tools your employees already use, while the Workday mobile app empowers your deskless workforce to be productive on the go.
Chapter 5 highlights: Workday security, privacy, and compliance—protecting your enterprise data.
At Workday, security and privacy are built into our products from the ground up, embedded in our development process, and woven into our company culture.
- Simplicity is one of the tenets of strong security. Workday achieves this by extending our security model to all data, transactions, processing, and applications in Workday enterprise products.
- As Workday develops and delivers new application features and updates, we apply automated security testing as a fundamental part of the delivery pipeline.
- Because every customer is on the same version of Workday, any and all security updates are immediately available to everyone.
Chapter 6 highlights: Workday Extend, integrations, and more—build agile solutions.
The Workday platform is an adaptable platform for finance and people, designed for extensibility and interoperability. Organizations meet their unique needs by building new apps through extending Workday with low- and no-code tools, and the power of Gen AI development. With the interoperability built into the Workday platform, teams can connect Workday with third-party systems and orchestrate processes seamlessly with integration tools and open APIs.
Extensibility and interoperability at Workday are guided by the following principles.
The Workday platform is the right place to build. New apps are built by extending proven Workday platform components.
Security and trust are at the core. All new apps built on Workday, as well as any integrations, inherit Workday trust and security.
Interoperability is foundational to Workday. Integrations, orchestrations, and open APIs are core to the Workday platform.
Chapter 7 highlights: Workday partners— working better together.
Workday is building an ecosystem of partners to help its customers adapt and thrive in a changing world. On the Workday Marketplace, customers can explore how to move their business forward with partner expertise that’s built and certified for the Workday platform.
- Take advantage of handpicked partners, trusted apps, and creative solutions.
- Connect with Workday and partner experts to supercharge your knowledge and thinking.
- Explore platform extensibility by finding apps and solutions that best suit your business needs.
The world of business never stands still.
Projects may have end dates. And jobs get marked done. But the business? The business is always in motion. At Workday, we’re always moving toward the next big thing. For example, we are confidently leading organizations of all sizes into the age of AI, with trust at the core of everything we do. As your partner, we’re not just building a platform that transforms how you manage your people and your money—we’re building a platform that helps you craft a better tomorrow.
To learn more about the Workday platform, read about our core technology.
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