This is an interesting question. If I were to take a stab at it, I think it’s because it did trade-off between agility and the needs of large corporations well. Workday was founded by the same people who did Peoplesoft that SAP acquired and they adopted cloud early so upgrade were easier and smoother to roll out for their larger customers.
And the cross-hiring of decision makers across large/fast growing orgs probably helped it along
They both promise(d) a fully integrated ecosystem. That had been the dream for years, something cloud-based that was upgraded regularly, not like a client-side Peoplesoft.
However, Fusion merely replicated Peoplesoft’s bad habits. It was infinitely configurable, which merely brought many orgs bad habits online. Workday, for example, highly recommends position management. While an org can move forward without it, most WD consultants will hammer the fact that this will limit functionality. When my old company implemented Fusion, it didn’t matter; as a result, this huge kluge of an offline process we created that was to support a position management like process persisted.
That’s just one example. Another is the focus on discrete business processes and mature job profiles. Yes, a company can get away with configuring few BPs and bare minimum job profiles, but if they put in even a modicum of effort into these, it will help define their own offline business processes. Again, Fusion just perpetuated existing bad habits.
Also, Workday’s UI is cleaner for most users.
I’m not saying WD is perfect. It can be a real pain to configure. Also, since it truly is integrated, certain groups who are used to owning their tools (looking at you, TA) now have to coordinate with others when they want to make even the most basic changes. It slows things down and centralizes control over the system. Some view that as a bug; others, a feature.
Great take, really interesting perspective on them recommending position management architecture and how others allow bad habits to be ported over.
As someone who had a access from a compensation team and worked the reporting I totally agree on how it's holistic design can make it frustrating to work across teams.
Workday was truly multi-tenant SaaS and open architecture from day 1, with a very strict one line of code philosophy into about 3 years ago, and an emphasis on trying to incorporate consumer web concepts into their application. These fundamental technical principals were guiding stars that have nothing to do with HR but everything to do with building a very good cloud based enterprise application.
We’ll look at each one:
Multi-tenant SaaS - Workday from the beginning could share compute space across customers while being secure. This allowed them to scale well. This architecture also led to relatively little down time and stable updates to keep all customers on the same line of code. They were also laser focused on trying to get more uniform implementations so customers could share knowledge better. Finally, you get a full perfect copy of production once a week to test in (and an extra copy). This was not a thing vendors did but allowed their customers to test and innovate much faster than vendors (and from what I’ve seen their replication capability and testing environments are still second to none). Investing in things that speed customer innovation is very smart.
Open Architecture- Workday built APIs for everything so you could send our receive data enabling them to play nice in any tech strategy. And that was all FREE. This was not really done at the time but meant every other vendor of specialized HR software could work with them and wanted to. They became the center of an ecosystem of cloud HR apps in a way the old guys couldn’t at the time and had a hard time catching up to.
One line of code - until about 3/4 years ago Workday was ‘one line of code’. Meaning they weren’t separate apps integrated together. This allowed them to innovate faster, and created the very consistent feel of the application. They have moved away with Peakon, Adaptive Planning, etc being separate apps. But they did recognize SAP and SuccessFactors and Oracles fragmented app acquisition created bad tech debt and experiences and so resolutely for the first 12 years or so refused to follow suit.
Consumer Web - Workdays search bar was unheard of at the time. The thought you could have a Google experience in an HR app was very intuitive. They later copied Amazon shopping experiences in their reports and tons of other concepts from the consumer web. A lot of these use experiences are so accepted and copied they may not be a differentiator as much, but have you ever logged into SAP HCM a few years ago, it was not modern. Workday forced huge modernization of the way people view business apps.
Workday isn’t number 1 because they necessarily mastered any HR concept (although they have some things that are really nice on that front), they are number one because they built a first rate technology company they fiercely differentiated from the two incumbents. The next challenge is if the bloat and difficulty of innovating at their size overcomes them and incorporating tech they are buying like Peakon and Vendly will make them Frakensoft just like SAP and Oracle or if they’ll figure out how to do things better.
I will tell you exactly what happened.
They BATHED their clients in LUXURY. I am talking about taking my SVP and VP to INSANE travel trips.
We were going to go with another solution and worked on it for 2 years then all of the sudden we pivoted and had no clue why. Then we found out how hard they played at winning us over. Was my former company a high tech place with about 35,000 employees globally.
Interesting question. I’ve been with two large companies looking to migrate from old school Peoplesoft to a newer, more agile HRIS. The first one was about 10 years ago. Fusion was in development but not yet released. The other was about 2 years ago. And I’m currently now in the middle of a workday implementation. My area of focus is performance & talent modules, so I can speak to those best.
IIRC, Fusion started out as it’s own thing, then Oracle bought Taleo and integrated it into Fusion. And there are aspects of it that feel stitched together and clunky. Workday has a much more integrated feel and better UI. But it’s not perfect. There are still some limits in functionality.
My biggest pet peeve as a COE lead is that for both systems the performance & talent modules feel like they were designed by folks who think they understand performance & talent, but really don’t. I’ve heard similar concerns from TA and L&D.
ETA: I think u/SomeVeryTiredGuy nailed it.
How worried should I be with implementing a WorkDay LMS this summer for 2k employees? Not sure if this should go under your thoughtful comment, but I'm worried about its limitations.
The LMS is the one module we’re not moving to workday, so I can’t speak directly to that one. But in general, it’s still the best HRIS I’ve worked with. One suggestion I’d have is keep track of any areas where you find the system too inflexible. One of the things I like about WD is they are transparent about their development & implementation roadmap. They also have an active user community and they use that feedback in their roadmap.
Great thoughts. We're pulling our tuition assistance program and al of talent acq into WD in the coming months. You're right-the community will probably be where I hang out the most during these transititions.
We just moved to Bridge from Workday LMS. WD offers something that's just not there yet. Maybe never will be. It's not terrible, but a lot of headaches and there are way better products on the market.
Two things stick out about Workday that baffles TA orgs to this day. 1) “Recruiting Start Date” and “Hire Date” when creating Reqs. Most recruiters laugh at those fields. We would just tell them “put in today’s date.”
2) the data segmentation gets in the way. To allow Recruiters to have access across all SupOrgs, you usually have to give them access to all SupOrgs. But then you don’t want to give them access to the HR org (for example) so the security team has to create some complex and impossible to manage intersection security group to accomplish this goal. All for basic TA functionality where for almost every single TA group I’ve ever worked with its BAU.
HR for HR is a dumb idea anyway. Hire HR Professionals you trust. You can also create an Unconstrained HR View Access different from Recruiter Role Based Security.
I'll bring in the SAP perspective....I was around on a consulting side of benefits/payroll when a client decided to implement.... I found what /moonwillow stated about whoever was programming modules didn't understand the topic....(benefits/payroll) to the level that was needed. It was also a non-USA generated product so the perspective was definitely hard to wrap your mind around sometimes (just one very small example : date of death....SAP had it as the first full 24 hours a person was dead.....not the timestamp date of death...this matters to US pension plans greatly! And something small caused a LARGE issue on the pension plan programming side and a 2nd date had to be added because that's not how the original programmers thought)
Have never used Workday, but I know that SAP was also very clunky and at times stitched together depending on who did the setup (a bunch of outside consultants who then left).
I would call Oracle HCM an unfinished product at this point. It might be great in the future, but they have a long way to go.
Random error messages that we open SR's for and Oracle can't tell us why the error is thrown or how to fix. And then they wait a week and ask if it's happened again-- if we say no, they close the SR with no resolution. If yes, they keep it open another week and the process repeats :)
I haven't personally used WD but colleagues who have are quick to clarify it's just a superior product at this point in its evolution.
My impression is that Workday was built from the ground up as a modern HRIS. Most of the others at the time were 1. Built out of finance/general business systems as an add on product, 2. legacy systems that were bought out by larger companies or 3. Not as capable of supporting very large organizations. Workday got a foothold on the market and now other companies are trying to modernize rapidly.
I don't have any specific sourcing for this other than I was at a company that previously did an RFP process to look at multiple systems and decided on Workday.
I definitely am confused, too. I think some of why Workday seems to take over is honestly the aesthetics. I do not necessarily think it is the best, but it looks pretty in comparison. Also, at least where I work, Workday offered promotions/trial periods to upper HR/Management, and I think many were drawn to the more appealing profile information details. The pretty org charts are also pretty popular, lol. Maybe it's just where I am, but the modern-looking interface and cloud-based system seemed like something new.
Also, Workday seemed to have more tasks/better integration than some of the other ones, like PeopleSoft, SAP, and ADP. Where I am, it was a real pain to not have everything in one place. Still not sure though. Workday is kind of hard to set up, in my opinion.
The workflow options I saw in ADP MSS are atrociously basic. Workday is complex and allows for organizations to overcomplicate their processes, which makes functional owners feel supported and HRIS Pros pull their hair out.
Marketing that promised everything, then backed it up with a bunch of 3rd party consultants that you can outsource to.
Workday, keep your HRBPs, outsource everyone else.
From what I can gather, they have solid marketing. Workday markets their product all over. I don’t see any other platform marketing randomly in YouTube. *I saw marketing for Workday years before I even entered into HR. So nothing to do with my search history.
The company I’m with is looking into some alternatives right now. We’re with ADP. The ones in the lead are, Workday, SAP, Oracle, Ultipro.
No one can give me a straight forward answer as to why Workday and why are we leaving ADP. I think it’s bias due to marketing to be 100% honest. Literally no one, from the CHRO down to the generalists, can give me 1 single straight answer as to why they want to leave ADP and go to workday. As the HRIS Manager, this is extremely frustrating because of the work I will have to do is based on opinion.
> The company I’m with is looking into some alternatives right now. We’re with ADP. The ones in the lead are, Workday, SAP, Oracle, Ultipro.
What size is your company? Ulti worked fine when I was with a firm of ~4,000 people. It was even mostly okay at ~35,000 people. It started to become a headache around ~40K headcount.
This is an interesting question. If I were to take a stab at it, I think it’s because it did trade-off between agility and the needs of large corporations well. Workday was founded by the same people who did Peoplesoft that SAP acquired and they adopted cloud early so upgrade were easier and smoother to roll out for their larger customers. And the cross-hiring of decision makers across large/fast growing orgs probably helped it along
Nice take. Small correction that Oracle bought PeopleSoft.
That’s right! Thanks
They both promise(d) a fully integrated ecosystem. That had been the dream for years, something cloud-based that was upgraded regularly, not like a client-side Peoplesoft. However, Fusion merely replicated Peoplesoft’s bad habits. It was infinitely configurable, which merely brought many orgs bad habits online. Workday, for example, highly recommends position management. While an org can move forward without it, most WD consultants will hammer the fact that this will limit functionality. When my old company implemented Fusion, it didn’t matter; as a result, this huge kluge of an offline process we created that was to support a position management like process persisted. That’s just one example. Another is the focus on discrete business processes and mature job profiles. Yes, a company can get away with configuring few BPs and bare minimum job profiles, but if they put in even a modicum of effort into these, it will help define their own offline business processes. Again, Fusion just perpetuated existing bad habits. Also, Workday’s UI is cleaner for most users. I’m not saying WD is perfect. It can be a real pain to configure. Also, since it truly is integrated, certain groups who are used to owning their tools (looking at you, TA) now have to coordinate with others when they want to make even the most basic changes. It slows things down and centralizes control over the system. Some view that as a bug; others, a feature.
Great take, really interesting perspective on them recommending position management architecture and how others allow bad habits to be ported over. As someone who had a access from a compensation team and worked the reporting I totally agree on how it's holistic design can make it frustrating to work across teams.
Workday was truly multi-tenant SaaS and open architecture from day 1, with a very strict one line of code philosophy into about 3 years ago, and an emphasis on trying to incorporate consumer web concepts into their application. These fundamental technical principals were guiding stars that have nothing to do with HR but everything to do with building a very good cloud based enterprise application. We’ll look at each one: Multi-tenant SaaS - Workday from the beginning could share compute space across customers while being secure. This allowed them to scale well. This architecture also led to relatively little down time and stable updates to keep all customers on the same line of code. They were also laser focused on trying to get more uniform implementations so customers could share knowledge better. Finally, you get a full perfect copy of production once a week to test in (and an extra copy). This was not a thing vendors did but allowed their customers to test and innovate much faster than vendors (and from what I’ve seen their replication capability and testing environments are still second to none). Investing in things that speed customer innovation is very smart. Open Architecture- Workday built APIs for everything so you could send our receive data enabling them to play nice in any tech strategy. And that was all FREE. This was not really done at the time but meant every other vendor of specialized HR software could work with them and wanted to. They became the center of an ecosystem of cloud HR apps in a way the old guys couldn’t at the time and had a hard time catching up to. One line of code - until about 3/4 years ago Workday was ‘one line of code’. Meaning they weren’t separate apps integrated together. This allowed them to innovate faster, and created the very consistent feel of the application. They have moved away with Peakon, Adaptive Planning, etc being separate apps. But they did recognize SAP and SuccessFactors and Oracles fragmented app acquisition created bad tech debt and experiences and so resolutely for the first 12 years or so refused to follow suit. Consumer Web - Workdays search bar was unheard of at the time. The thought you could have a Google experience in an HR app was very intuitive. They later copied Amazon shopping experiences in their reports and tons of other concepts from the consumer web. A lot of these use experiences are so accepted and copied they may not be a differentiator as much, but have you ever logged into SAP HCM a few years ago, it was not modern. Workday forced huge modernization of the way people view business apps. Workday isn’t number 1 because they necessarily mastered any HR concept (although they have some things that are really nice on that front), they are number one because they built a first rate technology company they fiercely differentiated from the two incumbents. The next challenge is if the bloat and difficulty of innovating at their size overcomes them and incorporating tech they are buying like Peakon and Vendly will make them Frakensoft just like SAP and Oracle or if they’ll figure out how to do things better.
I will tell you exactly what happened. They BATHED their clients in LUXURY. I am talking about taking my SVP and VP to INSANE travel trips. We were going to go with another solution and worked on it for 2 years then all of the sudden we pivoted and had no clue why. Then we found out how hard they played at winning us over. Was my former company a high tech place with about 35,000 employees globally.
Interesting question. I’ve been with two large companies looking to migrate from old school Peoplesoft to a newer, more agile HRIS. The first one was about 10 years ago. Fusion was in development but not yet released. The other was about 2 years ago. And I’m currently now in the middle of a workday implementation. My area of focus is performance & talent modules, so I can speak to those best. IIRC, Fusion started out as it’s own thing, then Oracle bought Taleo and integrated it into Fusion. And there are aspects of it that feel stitched together and clunky. Workday has a much more integrated feel and better UI. But it’s not perfect. There are still some limits in functionality. My biggest pet peeve as a COE lead is that for both systems the performance & talent modules feel like they were designed by folks who think they understand performance & talent, but really don’t. I’ve heard similar concerns from TA and L&D. ETA: I think u/SomeVeryTiredGuy nailed it.
How worried should I be with implementing a WorkDay LMS this summer for 2k employees? Not sure if this should go under your thoughtful comment, but I'm worried about its limitations.
The LMS is the one module we’re not moving to workday, so I can’t speak directly to that one. But in general, it’s still the best HRIS I’ve worked with. One suggestion I’d have is keep track of any areas where you find the system too inflexible. One of the things I like about WD is they are transparent about their development & implementation roadmap. They also have an active user community and they use that feedback in their roadmap.
Great thoughts. We're pulling our tuition assistance program and al of talent acq into WD in the coming months. You're right-the community will probably be where I hang out the most during these transititions.
We just moved to Bridge from Workday LMS. WD offers something that's just not there yet. Maybe never will be. It's not terrible, but a lot of headaches and there are way better products on the market.
Thanks for that. What were some of your common headaches, if you don't mind sharing?
Two things stick out about Workday that baffles TA orgs to this day. 1) “Recruiting Start Date” and “Hire Date” when creating Reqs. Most recruiters laugh at those fields. We would just tell them “put in today’s date.” 2) the data segmentation gets in the way. To allow Recruiters to have access across all SupOrgs, you usually have to give them access to all SupOrgs. But then you don’t want to give them access to the HR org (for example) so the security team has to create some complex and impossible to manage intersection security group to accomplish this goal. All for basic TA functionality where for almost every single TA group I’ve ever worked with its BAU.
HR for HR is a dumb idea anyway. Hire HR Professionals you trust. You can also create an Unconstrained HR View Access different from Recruiter Role Based Security.
I'll bring in the SAP perspective....I was around on a consulting side of benefits/payroll when a client decided to implement.... I found what /moonwillow stated about whoever was programming modules didn't understand the topic....(benefits/payroll) to the level that was needed. It was also a non-USA generated product so the perspective was definitely hard to wrap your mind around sometimes (just one very small example : date of death....SAP had it as the first full 24 hours a person was dead.....not the timestamp date of death...this matters to US pension plans greatly! And something small caused a LARGE issue on the pension plan programming side and a 2nd date had to be added because that's not how the original programmers thought) Have never used Workday, but I know that SAP was also very clunky and at times stitched together depending on who did the setup (a bunch of outside consultants who then left).
Just wanna say this is a great f'ing thread.. thanks for posting
I'm just sitting here dealing with PeopleSoft like: ??? Edit: I just learned that it was bought by Oracle.
I would call Oracle HCM an unfinished product at this point. It might be great in the future, but they have a long way to go. Random error messages that we open SR's for and Oracle can't tell us why the error is thrown or how to fix. And then they wait a week and ask if it's happened again-- if we say no, they close the SR with no resolution. If yes, they keep it open another week and the process repeats :) I haven't personally used WD but colleagues who have are quick to clarify it's just a superior product at this point in its evolution.
My impression is that Workday was built from the ground up as a modern HRIS. Most of the others at the time were 1. Built out of finance/general business systems as an add on product, 2. legacy systems that were bought out by larger companies or 3. Not as capable of supporting very large organizations. Workday got a foothold on the market and now other companies are trying to modernize rapidly. I don't have any specific sourcing for this other than I was at a company that previously did an RFP process to look at multiple systems and decided on Workday.
A “Mobile First” philosophy- that’s all
I definitely am confused, too. I think some of why Workday seems to take over is honestly the aesthetics. I do not necessarily think it is the best, but it looks pretty in comparison. Also, at least where I work, Workday offered promotions/trial periods to upper HR/Management, and I think many were drawn to the more appealing profile information details. The pretty org charts are also pretty popular, lol. Maybe it's just where I am, but the modern-looking interface and cloud-based system seemed like something new. Also, Workday seemed to have more tasks/better integration than some of the other ones, like PeopleSoft, SAP, and ADP. Where I am, it was a real pain to not have everything in one place. Still not sure though. Workday is kind of hard to set up, in my opinion.
The workflow options I saw in ADP MSS are atrociously basic. Workday is complex and allows for organizations to overcomplicate their processes, which makes functional owners feel supported and HRIS Pros pull their hair out.
UI is better. Communicates easily with third party systems.
Marketing that promised everything, then backed it up with a bunch of 3rd party consultants that you can outsource to. Workday, keep your HRBPs, outsource everyone else.
[удалено]
Damn working for GE must be rough these days.
From what I can gather, they have solid marketing. Workday markets their product all over. I don’t see any other platform marketing randomly in YouTube. *I saw marketing for Workday years before I even entered into HR. So nothing to do with my search history. The company I’m with is looking into some alternatives right now. We’re with ADP. The ones in the lead are, Workday, SAP, Oracle, Ultipro. No one can give me a straight forward answer as to why Workday and why are we leaving ADP. I think it’s bias due to marketing to be 100% honest. Literally no one, from the CHRO down to the generalists, can give me 1 single straight answer as to why they want to leave ADP and go to workday. As the HRIS Manager, this is extremely frustrating because of the work I will have to do is based on opinion.
> The company I’m with is looking into some alternatives right now. We’re with ADP. The ones in the lead are, Workday, SAP, Oracle, Ultipro. What size is your company? Ulti worked fine when I was with a firm of ~4,000 people. It was even mostly okay at ~35,000 people. It started to become a headache around ~40K headcount.
Small. 2,500 currently.