My 10th anniversary as a global Workday expert: Ready for the next 10 years

PARIS

 In that distant summer of 2013 when I spent ten intense days in London going through the highly demanding Workday certification process, I wondered whether that was time well spent. After all, few people in continental Europe could spell Workday then - actually, the only place to go through the certification course and exam was in London, nothing in Paris or Amsterdam. Apart from the UK, there were few customers in Europe, and most were just subsidiaries of US companies. Many of my friends and professional contacts questioned my sanity as it made more sense to continue as a system selection consultant dabbling in several tools like Oracle, SAP, Cornerstone and the myriad other HRIS systems available on the market rather than getting associated with just one. 

 Rewind a couple of years. I was presenting at the HR Technology Conference in Chicago and one late afternoon as I walked back to the hotel, whom did I see walking in the same direction? None other than Dave Duffield, the legendary founder of PeopleSoft and Workday. Many people will remember that his fight to protect PeopleSoft from Oracle's clutches are now the stuff of legend (I recounted that epic fight in my book High-Tech Planets: Secrets of an IT Road Warrior). I went up to him, introduced myself as a former PeopleSoft product manager in Sandy Riser's global team. "Great team," Dave was gracious enough to say, "you guys built an amazing number of payrolls in just a year and a half." I then asked him the burning question that has been on my (and many people's) mind: "After PeopleSoft, why didn't you just retire rather than embark on such a difficult project? After all, you revolutionized the HR technology space with PeopleSoft. Isn't it time to relax and enjoy a job well done?" I still remember his reply as if it were yesterday: "Two reasons. One, at age 60 I am too young to retire. Two, having lost PeopleSoft was a blessing in disguise because unencumbered by a legacy system we can focus on building an entirely modern system that would fix the limitations of the older generation of HR systems and be a native 21st century tool." 

My 12 clients made it happen

 I couldn't agree more as I had reached the same conclusion that our profession and industry needed a true cloud-based system. And since I did not want to be a mere gawker the way many analysts from Garther & Co are (pontificating on systems they have no idea how they are built or implemented), there was no other choice: I had to get my hands dirty and what better way to do that than on a new system with the potential to disrupt the market? So, after joining Wipro, then a Workday partner, I got my certification, started working on the first implementation in France and other countries. A year later, I went solo making a second strategic decision: to give a wider array of customers the benefit of my two decades of HRIS experience and now with the added benefit of being able to implement the most sophisticated HR system on the market. 

 We all make mistakes in life (business and otherwise) and I've had my share of those, but when it comes to investing in Workday and becoming a well-known expert in this system in addition to overall HRIS, that was one of the best decisions I ever made. Fast forwarding to June 2023, the exact month when 10 years earlier I became the first person in France to get certified on Workday, when I look at all that I have accomplished, I need to pinch myself to make sure I am not dreaming. I have been involved in 12 Workday implementations, many starting with Core HR as the foundation module, others on specialized modules, especially my favorite, Compensation: today more than one million employees are managed in Workday thanks to yours truly's modest efforts (in conjunction with others, of course). 

 Having my base in France, my clients have been logically Europe-based, but my international outlook means that most of them are global and in pre-Covid times I visited more countries around the world than many people have had hot dinners, in order to organize workshops, demo the system as we go through various iterations: design - build -test - training and deployment. I have partnered with hundreds of heads of HR, HR managers, Comp & Ben experts, HR Business partners, IT professionals as part of a client's resources along with dozens more of consultants and managers with Workday and the myriad implementation outfits part of such projects. A cast of thousands, literally. Just one round of Workday testing (End to End or User Acceptance) can easily bring me in contact with 100 people between individual testers, test leaders, system consultants and various managers involved in the process. 

The blogger with a Workday partner

 So, what's next? I'll answer with another question: Why change a winning combination? I may dedicate some time to helping a company re-engineer its HR processes, search for  a new system (where I keep a strict neutrality), even implement another system (always good to look at what others do - as I did recently with an Oracle implementation.) But most of my time will be spent on bringing my expertise to companies helping them make the most of their Workday investment, especially in my favorite areas:
-Core HR
-Compensation (both Core and Advanced - but also Payroll with the number of countries covered increasing)
-Security
-EIB (mass loads)
-Reporting.

(The last three running across all modules as I think no Workday expert can afford not to be cognizant of these three features as they are key to any implementation, be it Financials, HR, Recruiting or Learning.)

More modules/products/features around the above but also Extend and AI will appear which will keep me busy in the foreseeable future. Even current features will become more sophisticated to the point that most consultants will have to decide what their areas of expertise are, and these will become more and more limited in numbers as they specialize. 10 years ago, one could have a good command of most of Workday's modules. It is now nigh impossible. The future looks therefore quite bright, especially when no serious alternative to Workday is appearing on the horizon.