I am generally an optimistic person, and looking ahead at 2010 things feel pretty good. Conversations with HR and IT professionals are more upbeat than they’ve been in a long time. And even though analyst predictions for IT spending are only looking a little better than last year, companies seem to be back to planning and starting projects.

In this Webinar, Naomi will reprise and update her wildly successful closing keynote from the 2009 HR Technology Conference, updating her advice on how HR leaders and every of us can seize the opportunity of the recovery to deliver improved business outcomes for our organizations and improved career outcomes for ourselves through effective, highly automated human resource management (HRM).

Human Resources and Financial applications are traditionally robust and feature rich, yet complicated, requiring a lot of information from the user in order to accomplish a task or complete a transaction. Most of us only touch our HR and Finance applications once in a while. So Workday’s design and development teams work hard to provide expert users the rich capabilities they need, while helping occasional users accomplish things quickly and accurately.

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.”

As Ray Wang tweeted today, Workday are dusting off the Cape Clear Eclipse technology and planning on making it more widely available to our customers. Why are we doing this? Well, there is one very simple reason: We want to make it easier for our customers to consume the powerful Web Services that we expose.