Retiring Shared Demo Tenant: Workday's still correctable blunder

PARIS 

As my blog followers have known for quite some time, I am a great admirer of Workday: the company, its people, its products, its culture, its customer service. Many of my posts are testimony to this admiration, as is my decision to spend most of my working time implementing the product for my clients. This being said, my blog followers also know that I am no blind vendor cheerleader: When deemed necessary, I would not shy away from criticizing Workday as I did in my Open Letter to Dave Duffield and Aneel Bhusri about their approach to Europe. 

Now has come the time to point the finger at Workday again. In exactly one month, as per the below notice, Workday will retire its Shared Demonstration Tenants, usually known in the Workday family of users as GMS, and offer a paid version. This is a Very Bad Idea and before I expostulate on it, let me first explain to the layman what GMS is and why it is so important. 

GMS - A unique demo environment
GMS was one of the great innovations that Workday brought. For someone like me whose experience of an HR vendor's demo environment was limited to the dreadful ADS by Oracle, this felt like heaven when I first sampled it. At long last here was a system which you could go to 24x7 to check, demo with minimal preparation, learn any feature you were interested in. And it rarely let you down as it was bug-free. Actually, for one my first global Workday implementations, then a wall-to-wall 20-year SAP shop with more 140,000 employees, I was tasked with traveling the length and breadth of planet Earth to visit the major subsidiaries to convince them to give Workday a try.

Without GMS, I doubt I would have been able to pull it off. I wanted to demo what Workday could provide but since our tenant had not yet been fed with setup and worker data, I couldn't rely on it. So, I decided to enlist the help of GMS, hiring employees in Spain, Romania, Brazil, Korea, Morocco, Argentina - etc. in a way that made sense to those companies. I made it obvious to my stakeholders that this was a shared environment, that it didn't include all their specific data and processes but it could give them a sense of what was possible with Workday. 

LOGAN FOR PRESIDENT!

And it worked! All the subsidiaries agreed to greenlight the project and we started on implementation. The rest, as they say, is history.

Critical for SMEs

If my example is a good one to show how useful GMS is for a large, global multinational able to throw millions at its Workday implementation, think then how vital it is for an SME company struggling with limited resources and a shoestring budget. These companies cannot afford the multiplicity of tenants that Workday would readily charge them for. And I'm not speaking here of the complexity to manage several tenants, which in and of itself is not an issue except when you don't have the resources to do that. In addition, without GMS the learning curve for talent becomes steeper. 

More than a marketing blunder, this is a sales disaster-in-waiting. After targeting the mid-market for a while, it is counter-intuitive for Workday to remove one of its major selling points to this very market segment. I don't know what Carl Eschenbach is up to, but I can't see Dave Duffield, Aneel Bhusri or Chano Fernandez signing off on this. 

Rationale for the paywall
Although some detractors are lambasting Workday for this grab for customer dollars, there are some good reasons for it which have to do with Workday's amazing success. Quarter after quarter the customer base grows, which means that what used to be a few hundred concurrent users of GMS has now evolved into thousands and thousands of users from customers and partners. This in turn has made accessing GMS ever more difficult with the below message one of the greatest sources of frustration of customer administrators and project consultants. 

 Hence Workday's offer to its customers: "Rather than have a free demo tenant which you can rarely use, why not have a paid one which will always be at your disposal?"

Unacceptable policy change
Well, as we all know, there's no such thing as a free lunch - and certainly not a free tenant. The current shared GMS is included in customers' subscription. It is therefore disingenuous, not to say dishonest, from Workday to claim that they're just putting an end to a free goodie. We all know that Workday comes with a premium price tag, which is justified by the second-to-none quality of its products, consultants and resources. So, this "free" GMS is actually NOT free. Customers are paying for it, and expensively so.

If Workday feels that time has come to charge those who want to use GMS, then it should be consistent and reduce the subscription rate by as much. Those who feel they cannot do with GMS will then pay the new tenant price which means that at the end of the day they will be paying basically the same they were paying before for exactly the same service. And those who didn't use GMS (not many companies but they exist) and who resented having to pay for a service they weren't using will actually enjoy the new policy because they'll be paying less for a similar service level. Win-win for all.

Of course, I can hear you say, "Not so fast. Those who pay separately but at the same rate as before are getting a better service because the tenant is theirs and it'll be working without the access issues we've been experiencing of late." Well, that argument is a poor one because Workday always boasted of how scalable its system is. So, why is GMS now having concurrent access issues? And what guarantees do we have that even with a private GMS if our user base grows we won't suddenly be faced with this infamous "maximum number of users reached" message? 

What's next? Charging for the use of EIB? Of Customer Central? 

What Workday should do
Based on the previous, there are only two acceptable options for Workday:

(a) Reconsider its position, admitting it has erred and just scrap this new policy (Workday has backtracked in the past on some controversial decisions as soon as enough noise comes from their customer base);

(b) Stick with it but then revisit its pricing policy along the lines of what I described in the previous paragraphs.

What should customers do
Two situations here:
1. Net new customer considering Workday:  Do NOT sign the purchase order. Put the decision on hold while waiting for Workday's final decision.

2. Current Workday customer considering a scope extension: Do NOT license any new product until Workday does either of the two options I mentioned earlier (and make them know in no uncertain terms what you think that option should be - after all, Workday always claimed it listens to the "Voice of the Customer"), so let them know that without GMS you cannot prove the ROI for a new product. Also, check whether one of your current modules or one you're considering (such as Extend) doesn't come with GMS.

Workday, like all software vendors, will take into account customer demands when they hit the bottom line. When Workday sees that its next quarter isn't as good as what it expected, then it will have second thoughts and will become amenable to its customers' views. But customers should not accept that Workday just turn into another Oracle or SAP fleecing its customers whenever it feels it has an opportunity. 

Workday already took a leaf out of its competitors' book when it started growing its product line via acquisitions and not organically, even though it always said it abhorred such an approach. It is high time the similarities stopped. 

(This is the latest in a Workday series of posts by the blogger. The most popular ones can be found on the right-hand panel. For a full list, scroll down to the list of all posts by year)  

Workday vs Oracle: A comparison of two cloud HR systems

PARIS
If Workday is the belle of HR systems, Oracle is undoubtedly her ugly sister. Having implemented both, let me share some examples to prove my point. (The Oracle system here is the one that Oracle actively sells, Fusion HCM Cloud, having retired its shoddy predecessor, EBS, and putting PeopleSoft on life support.)

OVERALL SYSTEM USER FRIENDLINESS
In the 20 years I've known Oracle, one thing has not changed: its scant regard for customers and the most obvious consequence, poor user friendliness, reinforced by a technology that seems always a generation behind others. Key example: In most consumer-grade platforms you can get further details and actions from a given object you're looking at by clicking on the dots that can be found around that object, usually at the upper-right corner (just check any Google page) which in addition you can check by opening another tab.

As expected from a modern HR system like Workday, if you're looking at an org chart and wonder who a specific employee is, all you have to do is right click with the mouse on the dots and that employee record opens in a separate tab for you to peruse their data. Once your curiosity has been satisfied, just close that tab and go back to where you were, the org chart, to continue the work you were doing there.

No such luck if you're using Oracle Fusion. This supposedly latest-generation tool will display a pretty average org chart (see below) and should you want to see the details of a given employee there's no capability to open a tab with that employee's file. You'll have to go back to the landing page, search for that employee and then open their record. And then if you want to go back to where you were (that is, if you still remember what you were doing) you'll have to start all over again, go to the org chart, enter the team you're looking for and the system will display the page you were on eons ago.

As for the search bar, Oracle technology is still stuck in a time warp: it is case and accent sensitive. So if you have an employee called Pénélope (in French) or Penélope (Spanish), and you enter "Penelope" you'll get no results. Obviously, no Oracle developer has ever used Google and other similarly ubiquitous internet tools. 

Menu jumbo-mambo
 

In Workday, action menus are organized alphabetically, which is the logical way to go about things on Planet Earth. The five most frequently used actions appear first, which is a great time saver. On Planet Oracle, actions appear randomly, making you waste quite some time going up and down and across the the screen in hot pursuit of the action you need. Nobody ever told Oracle that making life easier for the customer should be top priority.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

SYNC ISSUE
We all know that "integrated" systems are rarely so, but what is amazing is that with Oracle even within a single module or feature thereof you still run into synchronization issues. Let's say that as a manager you perform an action in Workday (e.g., move an employee from your team to another) and this action requires an approval from another role (say, HR.) You log in as that HR person and here's the approval task awaiting you. Try and do the same in Oracle: you'll have a 3 to 5-minute time lag before the action travels from Manager to HR. In real life it doesn't really matter, but in project mode when you're constantly testing system setup and configuration it soon becomes bothersome and frustrating. 

Language enablement is another area where Oracle's sync'ing prowess is, shall I say, sinking? If you need to turn on a certain number of languages to go with your global deployments, with Workday it can be done in a couple of clicks and you see the results instantly. If you are unfortunate to have selected Oracle Fusion, you need to request language activation with Oracle Support. If you happen to do this on Monday, too bad, since this is done over the weekend. And since it takes half a day per language, your global implementation may have to wait an additional couple of weeks before you can go in and start checking translations.

SECURITY AND WORKFLOW
Whereas Workday can handle complex security requirements via domain and business process security, Oracle is very limited, often offering only global roles with no possibility to restrict per country/company or other criteria. In addition, whereas Workday proposes role names that are meaningful (Compensation Partner, HR Partner etc.) Oracle suggests roles with inordinately long names to remind users what that role can do (HRWithCompensationNoNotification). Can't get uglier than that.

Managing role conflicts is always an issue the more complex system implementation is. Whereas Workday has its own challenges, business process conditions work pretty well.  (Glossary: business conditions which allow you to decide how a specific role at a  specific step in a given workflow should behave.) Oracle, on the other hand, doesn't manage role conflict satisfactorily. A user case I struggled with during an implementation of Fusion  is the typical case of an HR user who is manager of an employee for whom he also plays the role of HR. If this manager initiates an action as manager and this action requires HR approval, you'd think since this manager is also this employee's HR they don't need to approve themselves. You'd be wrong! Oracle will make you do exactly that, which is absurd. You won't have this issue with Workday because its workflow configuration includes the possibility to exclude someone from approving a task if they are the initiator.

In summary, Oracle's  workflow capability can't hold a candle to Workday's which is extremely rich and allows for a level of granularity and sophistication Oracle customers can only dream of.

HALF-BAKED SYSTEM
Both Workday and Oracle provide various seniority dates to be used where relevant depending on whether one is interested in a hire date, or a company date, or time in a position etc. The similarities  end here: whereas Workday offers straight out of the box all these dates (as a user just go to an employee's record file and you'll see all the dates for that employee), Oracle will ask the user to launch a calculation for the dates they are interested in, otherwise they just remain empty not because some data is missing but because you haven't requested its calculation!!! Use case: You launch a promotion action on an employee and in order to help you make up your mind you need to know how long they have been in their current position.
In Workday, the data display effortlessly so you can continue with your promotion task.
In Oracle, you'll probably be met with an empty field, so you'll have to abort the task (remember you can't have two tabs or pages open at the same time in Oracle), go to the Seniority Dates screen in Quick Actions,  request a calculation, and then start the promotion task all over again. Awful user experience. Got forbid that at that moment you need to check another piece of information (say, compensation). You'll have to exit the promotion task one more time, go to Compensation, view the data and, if you still have not slit your throat in despair, launch a THIRD time the promotion task. One of the nuttier design decisions I've ever seen in my quarter-century experience of HR systems. 

Simple and available - the Workday way

DATA LOAD/MIGRATION
I could rant for days on how complicated data management is with Oracle, but suffice it to give one example: data inactivation. Let's say that you created a contract type which is becoming obsolete. To inactivate it you will need two rows: Start and End Dates of the period when the contract was valid and another row with the Start and End Dates when it is no longer valid. Now, since the End Date of Inactive is till the end of time Oracle requires you to put something like 4532. Why this date and not 9999 the way they do it at SAP? And why do we even need to put an End Date? Because Oracle is still run by the same people who created the relational database and keep on thinking along the lines of this technology that harks back to the last millennium. 

QUESTIONABLE DATA MODEL
Every vendor has their own data model which has been a perennial issue in system-to-system integration. None is worse than the manager data model as pursued by Oracle versus Workday. With Workday, a manager is appointed on an organization (or team) and any employee part of that team will share the same manager. Clear and straightforward - even if some first-time Workday users may be taken aback at the logical consequence of this choice: a manager will always sit in an organization above the one holding his/her team.  An employee is hired into an organization. With Oracle, things are illogical and a source of endless confusion to users: a department with 3 employees can have 3 different managers since employees are linked directly to a manager, and in this case each can have a different manager. A department manager can be assigned (as a system admin task) but only employees without a directly assigned manager will inherit that departmental head as manager. You can easily see how ugly this can turn with different employees having different managers, some sharing the same or having none whatsoever.

Calculated Fields vs FastFormulas
In short, both are ways to write custom rules such as a calculation of a compensation element or a condition/eligibility rule to apply to who should get that compensation component. And that's where the resemblance between the two stops. Whereas Workday has innovated with an easy-to-use feature whereby you assemble your rules from different objects Lego-like, Oracle is still stuck in last millennium's technology -hardly surprising when you know that FastFormulas are a transplant from Oracle's much-hated EBS HR system which only a database nerd can make sense of. See below screenshot from the two to get a sense of  how Workday has managed to become the default tool of HR users. 

Today's tool vs yesterday's

Custom Objects vs Flexfields

Here again, we have similar objects aiming at extending a system's capabilities beyond what was initially supplied by the vendor. But whereas Workday makes it easy to build, use and maintain such objects, Oracle's Flexfields have serious limitations. One of the most egregious being that on any screen it is linked to, a Flexfield appears systematically at the bottom. To give you an example, let's suppose that in a Hire screen in addition to the standard "Business Title" field, you want to add a related field called "Local Business Title". Since Oracle doesn't offer a second such field you'll have to create it via Flexields. So be it, except that being a Flexfield it appears all the way at the bottom of the screen, probably next to a data section on addresses or blood type which have nothing to do with it. Very confusing to the user. Worse, if the Flexfield is to be filled with a value depending on what you entered in the standard field, you'll have to scroll all the way up to remind yourself what you entered and, having duly taken note of it, scroll all the way back down to enter a value for the second, related, object. In terms of customer experience, it's simply awful, but on a par with Oracle's products.

DOCUMENTATION
The differences between the two vendors couldn't be starker: whereas Workday has a flourishing Community where you can find an easy answer to set-up documents, share best practice ideas with other customers, suggest enhancements to the tool (and track its status), Oracle is...well, Oracle. Its Help Center is anything but helpful. All you get is some marketing PowerPoint presentations, fluffy documents, links to attend Events and that's it. If men are from Mars and women from Venus, well Workday is clearly from Planet Customer and Oracle is still stuck in its Planet Larry Ellison - or Technology: the two are interchangeable.

So, why do some companies buy it?
I could go on for hours and inflict thousands of additional pixels on your retina, but I think you get my drift. Which prompts the following question: with Workday being manifestly so superior to Oracle in every way, why do some customers still buy Oracle for their HR needs? 

First, you have to realize that only current customers (those who are using Oracle database or middleware or Financials or legacy EBS system) have any interest in envisioning the possibility of purchasing Oracle's Fusion system. 

Second, a majority of Oracle customers (both PeopleSoft and EBS) moving their HR system to the cloud do it not with Oracle Fusion, but with...Workday, proof enough of what they really think of their current vendor.

Third, as for the minority who decides to stick with Oracle, you may still wonder that only masochists would spend good money on bad technology. And here you'd be more right than you may think. When I referred to these customers as buying Oracle Fusion HR, actually I wasn't being accurate because one of Oracle's (many) dirty little secrets is that these customers actually don't buy Oracle HR because ...they get it for free! Oracle just tells them that if they take Fusion Financials, they'll get HR for free. Most customers make the decision that sure it looks ugly but you don't look a gift horse in the mouth, do you? So, they decide to plod on and make the best out of a bad situation.

It's not dissimilar to those millions of consumers  who have a regular meal at McDonald's knowing it's not good for their health (or their palate) but that consideration is outweighed by price and convenience. 

So, my advice to Oracle customers as they head to Oracle CloudWorld is to remind them of that old phrase: you get what you pay for. And as you've seen it in this analysis, there's no denying it: Workday blows Oracle out of the water.

When Workday’s “Power of One” fails: An example from Payroll-Compensation integration

LONDON

At the turn of the millennium, PeopleSoft, the then-undisputed HR tech leader, asked me to join them as Product Strategy Manager to help them with their European payrolls. Until 2001, PeopleSoft only had payroll for North America. For other countries the spin was that what really mattered was to have all your employees’ key data in one global system (Core HR) which you would then interface to various downstream systems (Payroll, Finance, Time Tracking, Expenses etc.) depending on needs. The underlying message was that Payroll was just an engine, not a strategic tool and therefore there was little value in having it in the same system. Actually you didn’t even need to have it in-house, just outsource it to ADP and the likes.

That was until PeopleSoft realized there was a lot of money in the Payroll business and that there was a lot of value in a Payroll-Core HR/Compensation integration after all. That’s when they built a global team, of which your humble servant was part of covering France and Spain. In a payroll blitzkrieg unheard of in the industry until then and since, we brought to the market close to a dozen payrolls (France, Spain, UK, Germany, Switzerland, Netherlands, Japan, Australia and a sprinkling of other countries).

Suddenly, in a not-so-subtle move that I found highly entertaining, Payroll/Compensation integration was all the rage. At every meeting with customers, at HR tech conferences, in press and analyst encounters, our message was that an HR system without payroll wasn’t worth the pixels it showed on your PC monitor. You needed the Payroll module as a mandatory accessory to your global Core HR/Compensation.

Fast forward two decades and to today’s indisputable HR Tech leader, Workday. Just like its forerunner, Workday started with a limited number of payrolls (and no finance tool), so it was all about having a global core HR system, the rest was dismissed with a wave of the hand as optional, ancillary and unimportant. Then came finance and the slow drip feed of payroll and, lo and behold, out of the cloud emerges the fundamental, indispensable need to be able to integrate both within the same system with the same data model and UI (which now goes by the fancy term of UX). Workday coined the phrase of the Power of One which as they say in their marketing material does not “require any process or configuration changes on your end”.

Well, as we all know, there’s marketing and there’s the truth. Or, to paraphrase Mark Twain, there are three types of lies: lies, statistics and software marketing (truth be told, Workday is certainly not the most egregious perpetrator here; the Oscar probably goes to Oracle and their fanciful claims about basically every product they throw at their customers.)

But, back to Workday, since this post is about Workday. There are many examples where the Power of One is contradicted by the reality of many. The one that I want to focus on deals with one of my favorite Workday and HR topics: Compensation under its various guises: Core Compensation, Payroll and Compensation Review.

Compensation Review is the process whereby you increase employee salaries and award them bonuses and stocks, usually once a year, based on their performance (and the company’s.) To run this process Workday has a pretty strong module called Advanced Compensation, on which I got certified in 2019. I’m not going to inflict boring technical and business details on you, but suffice it to say that in order for a bonus to be calculated you need a reference compensation if your bonus is going to be a percentage rather than an amount. That reference compensation (which is called Compensation Basis in the Workday lingo) is usually the standard salary (Total Base Pay in Workday-ese ) or it can be created from scratch to include any compensation component such as allowances as long as these compensation components are…available in Workday. If they are not (such as overtime which is often part of another tool, Payroll) then you need to load those amounts back into Workday using some esoterically named Eligible Earnings Override.

 

The villain revealed

So far so good. Everybody understands that Workday cannot retrieve a data not held within Workday. And since a majority of Workday customers use third-part payrolls (especially outside North America), it is perfectly understandable that these amounts need to be extracted from your payroll system, appropriately formatted  and then loaded into Workday for Advanced Compensation’s consumption.

 

Except that, and here’s the rub, there are many customers who use Workday Payroll. In that case you’d assume from Workday Payroll to Workday Core/Advanced Compensation the data should flow as easily as the River Thames under London Bridge.

Wrong!

Rather than being able to point your bonus calculation to the relevant Payroll earnings (or sum thereof) you still have to go through the whole cumbersome task of extracting/preparing the data in payroll, then loading it into Workday, then going and referencing it for your bonus calculation.  Where is the Power of One? Looks more like the madness of many ─ as we all know how messy integrations are. When you’re using separate systems, no queda más remedio as my Spanish friends would say, you have to build that interface. But why would you have to do that when you’re running the SAME system? That’s what you were told and sold: buy one and no integration need, right?

I heard that Workday is planning on fixing this, which is long overdue. But why did you even have the issue in the first place?  Bad product design happens everywhere, even with the best. But then be a little modest when taunting your Power of One which has been found lacking.

And don’t get me started on absence management. With Workday you can track your employee absences in Core HR, in Time Tracking and via Payroll as well. In Core HR you have it more than once: the standard Absence features and the Leave of Absence functionality. Like estranged siblings, neither seems to be aware of the other’s existence. Another product strategy gone mad.

Workforce Planning? Integrated only in name. Another Power of One derailed.

Alright, I thing I’ll stop here. You get my drift. Time for Workday to spend a bit less time on Marketing and more on Product Strategy and Development.

 

(This is the latest in a series of posts on Workday. The most popular feature below. Many more can be found by searching chronologically the list of posts on the right-hand pane.

-Feb. 2021: "10 features Workday should deliver - yesterday!"

-April 2016: "SOW - A Comparison of 3 Global Cloud HR vendors: SAP, Oracle and Workday"

-Feb. 2015: "An open letter to Workday's Bhusri and Duffield: Time to fix Europe"

-May 2011: "PeopleSoft vs Workday - Old vs New" )

 

(The Global HR Technologist is enjoying a 4-day Jubilee Holiday in London, a place he has been visiting relentlessly on business and pleasure for over three decades now, going back to when he was a teenage student in Britain under the Iron Lady’s rule. “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London everything that life can afford,” said Dr. Johnson a couple of centuries ago. So true now as then.)