November 4, 2010 by Andrew McCarthy

Quite a while back, we were reviewing functionality in an upcoming Workday update.  Onboarding a temp was one of the new capabilities included in the product, and during the demonstration the product manager said, "so to onboard a contingent worker, you click here, open a requisition and..."  And someone interrupted him.  "Actually, I don't.  When I need a person to do a job, I look for a person...requisitions and contingent workers are things that HR or Finance people do.  I find people to complete the work that my team is committed to for a given project."

Having evolved from the back-office, ERP applications all too often start with structures and approaches that are burdened with administrative lingo, processes, and approaches.  While consistency, rules and accounting are critical for managing, aligning, and measuring business, they are a distant second to supporting employees in getting work done.

With Workday 9, we worked closely with our customers to hit this issue square on the head: how do we deliver a user experience that helps managers and employees accomplish their work quickly and easily?  Looking at solutions from the perspective of the workforce not benefits those workers, it also helps HR, Finance, and administrative teams make a company's standard processes also the easiest way to get things done.

To put it in perspective, here's the manager landing page in Workday 8.  Lots of functionality, lined up in a straightforward Web format similar to a Web 2.0 newsreader.  Everything is just a click away.

But resounding feedback from customers was that while great for the back office, this environment was just far too complicated for the broad employee population.  Here's Workday 9:

In place of boxes and links, we've provided managers with a group of simple, configurable icons that represent the things they need from Workday: hiring a person, changing something related to an existing worker, approving an expense item, etc.  Things that managers and employees do.  The new Workday 'wheel,' combined with the basics of e-mail notification, BlackBerry and iPhone access, are big steps in delivering solutions that are about the worker and about the business.  A good place for a little re-invention.

­ - Andrew