HR systems in 2050

BARCELONA 

Today is the first day when we are closer to 2050 than to 2000. Time to look back and ahead and try that most perilous of exercizes: predict the future.

2000: Turn of the millennium
The turn of the century, which was also the turn of the millennium, is when I had just started out in the HRIS vendor business, having joined PeopleSoft as Product Manager for France and Spain. I still remember vividly the drivers for all companies investing in a modern HRIS system:

-Self Service
-Training and competencies
-Global HR system of record
-Total cost of ownership.
-Internet was barely starting out and edging out client-server-based systems.

2025: What has really changed
-Rebranding of major HR areas: Time and Attendance/Time and Labor Management has become Workforce Mangement, Strategic HR is now Talent Management, Training has morphed into Learning and, of course, Human Resources is now Human Capital.
-DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) became all the rage, although the pendulum seems to be swinging in the opposite direction
-BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) seemed  destined to a promising future but, faced with security risks, many companies still insist on their employees, even on their contractors, using corporate devices. 
 -Generative AI and AI Agents are more hype than reality.
-Mobile HR has become reality with casual users (i.e. employees and managers) relying as much if not more on their smartphone and tablets to access their HR applications  than power users (HR specialists.)
-Analytics has definitely become bigger and has become one of the success stories helping HR show its value to the business by relying on hard-to-refute data.
-Metaverse and gamification never held up their promises and the fad disappeared as soon as it appeared.
-Well-Being seems to be another of those fads which I have little doubt will slowly fade into the susnet of HR systems never to be seen again.

2050: Who knows

Since I am as likely to be wrong as right, but acutely aware that even if I'm still around many of my readers won't be, let me try the following:
-AI will become a cornerstone of HR systems in more ways than one.
-Reskilling and upskilling and any other dimension of skills will also feature prominently in HR areas of action (if not of concern) especially as a consequence of the previous trend.
-New career paths or new definition of what a career is will appear.
-Communication will go into directions which we can hardly envisage today (TikTok for HR?)
-One change though is inevitable: many vendors will disappear, some will survive and new ones will emerge. 

What HRIS vendors for 2050
The table below looks at HRIS vendors in 2000, 2025 and 2050. I can see some vendors surviving in 2050, but some will be gone just like those I knew a quarter century ago. Who now remembers Peterborough Software? It was such a major vendor in the UK in 2000 and is now largely gone. The only two vendors that I see making it into 2050 is ADP, celebrating its centennial, and SAP. I have strong doubts that Workday, the current HRIS leader, will survive. It may well be on its way out while Cornerstone and Saba will be long dead. As ancient Romans used to say, "Sic transit gloria mundi" - and thus passes the glory of the world. 

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)  

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.

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.

Payroll vs Compensation: The sempiternal HRIS conundrum

RIO DE JANEIRO

Recently, a UN agency which is making the transition from an SAP-based HR system to Workday asked me what they should keep in their legacy system and what should be tracked in Workday. I was glad to share my knowledge and experience as this issue is something I witness in every HRIS implementation I work on. (Disclosure: In my distant past, I worked several years for the UN in New York and Madrid.) 

To understand the complexity of the analysis to be undertaken, you have to realize that the situation is radically different based on whether this is the first time you're embarking on an HRIS project versus whether you already had an on-premise HRIS system and are now moving to a cloud-based one.

If the latter, two situations may arise:

(1) Your scope includes Payroll: In that case it's to a large extent a shift-and-lift exercize. Of course, you may struggle with the limited availability of country payrolls in the cloud system you're moving to versus your legacy system (for instance, SAP has scores of country payrolls whereas Workday has only 4, with 2 more in the works.) This will limit your shift-and-lift capabilities as for the countries in your scope missing a cloud payroll you'll find yourself in a situation similar to the next one.

(2) Your scope doesn't include Payroll: either because (a) your cloud vendor doesn't cover your scope fully, or (b) because to minimize risk, you decided to keep Payroll out of scope for the time being. That's when you have to make a determination what to keep in your local Payroll system and what can be moved to your new cloud system's Compensation module. 

This exercize is similar to the one you'll have to run if you've never had a full-fledged HRIS in the first place. Or, which is the same, if your HRIS is basically your payroll system where HR Admin/Compensation and Payroll are subsumed in the same tool. You'll be surprised by how many companies, domestic or global, still fall in this category.

What is Payroll and what is Compensation?

There may be as many answers as there are unique circumstances. However, one can safely adopt the  following rules of thumb:

• Gross versus net: Compensation, and therefore your new HR system, should definitely hold your gross salary and similar items (such as allowances), whereas the net amount will be held by your local payroll. Don't get confused by the word "calculation" and think that all calculations are made in Payroll and simple amounts are held in Compensation. A Seniority allowance will have to be calculated first in Compensation and only when you have the amount due to the employee, will it then feed Payroll which, after performing a gross-to-net calculation, will then disburse the amount to the employee (via direct deposit or check.)
  
  
• Complex calculation: If a given compensation component needs to be calculated based on criteria and data which are not tracked in your new HRIS (let's say, time worked) then the decision is obvious: only track it in Payroll. 
  
  
• Compensation Package/Total Rewards visibility: One of the advantages of a modern HRIS is the ability to have all your employees' full compensation at your fingertips with a few clicks. If a compensation component is considered as meaningful and can be calculated in your HRIS then it should be part of Compensation. This criterion should definitely be taken into account when selecting a system as Workday, SuccessFactors and Oracle HCM Cloud (a.k.a. Fusion) are far from being interchangeable when it comes to their ability to take different data types into account when calculating a compensation item. 
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Document generation: If there is little doubt that producing a Payslip is a task best left with your local Payroll tool(s), you may decide that it makes sense from a business perspective that storing it in your new HRIS as part of Employee Documents (depending, of course, on your vendor's technological prowess.) On the other hand, if you use your HRIS to run your Annual Salary Review process, then generating your employees' Compensation Statements will be a task for Compensation, not Payroll.
  
  
• Many other criteria  and factors could also weigh in, depending on a company's unique circumstances, but remember the cardinal rule: Your new HRIS should NOT be a carbon copy of your Payroll, the two are linked but as explained in the few examples provided above they are quite different beasts and as such should be treated differently. 
  
  
  (The Blogger/Consultant, after having just implemented an Oracle-based HRIS is now taking a two-week vacation in the Wonder City before starting a new HRIS implementation project, this time based on Workday.)

10 features Workday should deliver - yesterday!

PARIS 

Since 2013, when almost nobody in continental Europe could spell “Workday”, and I became the first person in France to get certified on the system and project methodology, I have worked on 9 Workday implementations. That’s an average of 1 project a year, with some taking over 2 years while others would be graced with my contribution for 5 or 6 months.

Such an experience warrants the $64,000 question: Is Workday the best HRIS tool in the world? The answer is an emphatic YES!
 
Is everything perfect with it? Not by a long stretch. I never was into the blind vendor cheerleading that so many “analysts” engage in. Back in 2015, I wrote a critical open letter to Dave Duffield (whom I had met and chatted with at the 2007 HR Technology Conference in Chicago when Workday was a 2-year-old infant) and Aneel Bhusri, Workday’s co-CEOs, about some issues that the company needed fixing in Europe.
 
Today, I’d like to focus on the product side of things. Here are 10 enhancements that are way overdue.

 

1.       Ever since Workday changed its User Interface (UI) I in Workday 29, I’ve been waiting for something better because, let’s face it, the new worklet icons are plain ugly. They look like some kid’s unfinished drawings. And while you’re at it, could we have the Directory Swirl (a.k.a. The Wheel) back? ? I loved it when it was there. I miss it now that it’s gone.

2.       Improved search capabilities. When Workday premiered we all oohed and aahed about the Search Box, something truly from the other world. In all demos, Workday’s sales people keep on harping on how easy it is to access a feature (report, task, employee, organization) by just “Googling” it. Well, software vendor hyperbole apart, back at the beginning this was largely revolutionary when compared with the Jurassic Park-era tree structure navigation of older generation systems. But Google? Not exactly. Only recently has Workday included memorized searches (and frequently used tasks) but I still cannot understand why they can’t provide suggested searches. Google “South Afrika” and Google will immediately suggest “South Africa”. Search for “Hier Employee” and Workday draws a blank, unable to understand the user means the frequent task “Hire Employee”. Really? How much complicated can it be to propose “Did you mean ‘Hire employees?’” 

3.       Better migration tools between tenants. One of the challenges of working on a Workday project is that you have to wrap your head around several environments or “tenants”. The end-user facing one is referred to as Production (that’s the one employees and managers see and use in their daily life) but the back-office team (HR, IT, implementation partners) work on various copies of this production version at varying stages of accuracy (or refreshes).  One tenant may be used for training, another one for a specific sub-project or stream (say Payroll or Recruiting), one for development, so on and so forth. When you update the configuration in one tenant and need to copy it onto another one, as a customer you can use Object Transporter, a.k.a. OX for the cognoscenti. The problem is that not all Workday objects can be migrated via OX (for instance, Participation Rule Sets can’t.) By way of consequence,  you have to rely on either mass loads or re-create the same configuration manually which, as everybody knows, is an error-prone exercize. And even when OX can be used, it does have its peculiarities: a compensation plan, for instance, will always be migrated with an effective date as of the day when it was done. You therefore lose all history and can’t see what a plan looked like at a specific date in the past.

4.       Improve the translation of delivered/custom fields. Workday offers a translation in 13 languages for most end user-facing objects/fields  that it delivers. (For some twisted reason of theirs, Workday considers French as 2 separate languages, forgetting that, as Churchill once said, “America and Britain are two countries separated by the same language”.) A perennial issue has been how to change those translations (or English-language labels) if you’re not happy with them (I for one positively hate the term “Contingent Worker” for contractors or interim staff). The polyglot I am always have fun when demoing Workday in French, Spanish or Portuguese where at times fits of uproarious laughter grip the audience. Once the guffaws have subsided, you often can’t do more than just bite the bullet and dump the issue on Change Management ─ the poor team tasked with making the indefensible palatable to end users.

      Workday has recently introduced a feature called Custom Label Overrides which is a marked improvement, but it works a bit haphazardly and sometimes in overkill fashion. Let’s say that in the Compensation Review Grid you have a tab called Merit and you want to translate it in French as “Augmentation au mérite” rather than the standard Workday translation of “Mérite”. If you use Custom Label Overrides, Workday will translate it alright, but will apply the same translation throughout the system even where you don’t want it to. For instance, for “Merit Plan” you’re happy with “Plan de mérite” and you certainly don’t want the longish and absurd “Plan augmentation au mérite”. Why can’t Workday just offer a translation feature via a Relation Actions off any such objects, the way it does it for most translatable items? Obviously, its technology doesn’t support that yet, but hopefully Workday can improve on this front. 

  5.    Consistency across the system. Sometimes to view an object in Workday you just have to enter the name. Other times you have to enter “View XXX”. It would be a big saver if we could just have a single way. I like the “View XXX” approach since you can contrast it with “Edit XXX” (although for the life of me I still can't fathom why to edit an object the task is sometime called “Maintain XXX” and not “Edit XXXX”.) Equally, Workday makes distinction between Delete and Inactivate (e.g., for an Organization) but when it comes to a Position the terminology changes to Close and Freeze. Why? It is exactly the same concept.

6.       More and better ways to hide fields. Another perennial localization issue has to do with those endless screens that some Workday tasks require. These screens could be made much shorter and less confusing to end users by removing all those pesky fields that may be useful to a US-based user but mean nothing to the rest of the world. Workday has made great strides with Configure Optional Fields, but those are still very limited. 

7.       Mass loads are quite useful and powerful but the glorified Excel spreadsheet that EIB is does take some getting used to. It can be quite frustrating to struggle with files where some Required fields can be left out and the data gets loaded, or some Optional fields turn out to be mandatory. My favorite? When you’ve loaded thousands of data (say, salary updates) and the system says, “All records loaded successfully”. You go back to the Worker Profile and nothing has happened, no update. Sometimes you just want to slice your throat and end your misery.

8.       Confusing terminology. I’m not talking here about how some customers struggle to relate Workday terminology to their own use? After all, when you adopt the SaaS model, you should adapt to it, that’s a given. What I mean here is that some objects are sometimes referred to interchangeably when they are separate objects. “Job” and “Position” are among the most egregious examples, e.g., “View Job history” when you are looking at a history of positions. Why not call it then “View Position History.”

9.       Additional country payrolls. Workday is largely nicknamed as PeopleSoft 2.0. And rightly so since it was largely built by former PeoplePeople (of whom this blogger proudly recalls his days as one of them two decades ago), and just like its predecessor has won the hearts and minds of HR users and leaders. However, in one respect Workday lags far behind its illustrious forerunner: I recall vividly that at the turn of the millennium when PeopleSoft went global, in just 18 months we added 6 new payrolls: France, Spain (I was the Product Manager for these two countries’ payrolls), Germany, Netherlands, Italy, Switzerland. Workday in 15 years of existence has only delivered 4 payrolls. If Workday were some second-tier HRIS vendor, or a dinosaur like SAP and Oracle, I could understand this under-performance. But you guys are the leader. I understand that creating a true SaaS-based payroll has challenges of its own, but are you guys the trailblazers or not? Show the industry that it can be done and deliver on it.

Coining the word "glocalization" a decade ago

10.   I have written extensively on the localization aspects of an HRIS in this blog, and I can only reiterate here what I have also touched upon a little bit earlier, that what is good for the US is not necessarily useful for the rest of the world. Prime example: masking a SSN (Social Security Number) to the employee, when they are the ones who provided it in the first place! In other countries, SSN is just one ID among many others and there is no point in being paranoid about it (Brainstorm 43602 for those who know what a Brainstorm is.)  Another example: City Lookups. Can Workday improve here as this is sorely needed because it creates endless issues when interfacing to third-party systems, especially payroll tools?

 

Before I wrap up here, let me give a piece of advice to my friends at Oracle and SAP. Before you gleefully rub your hands thinking how you could use this information in sales cycles to win some competitive advantage, remember that despite all its faults Workday is way ahead of you: whether talking about product, strategy, implementation methodology, partner engagement or the revolutionary way Workday treats and interacts with its customers, you guys just play second fiddle and catch up to Workday. It would be time well spent to focus on your own weaknesses and fix them rather than try to trash a vendor that has revolutionized our industry.

(This week has been particularly busy for the blogger who has just launched his second Annual Compensation Review in a row - this time  for a global client in the construction industry. Which probably explains why I am drawing so many examples from the compensation world.) 

Gartner's HR Magic Quadrant: A Stronger Rebuttal

 

Gartner's HR Magic Quadrant: A Stronger Rebuttal

PARIS

November is usually a time for celebration: On one side of the Pond it  brings Thanksgiving, on the other the new beaujolais. This year not only does it take place during a persistent pandemic but it also brings the latest edition of technology research firm Gartner's HR Magic Quadrant. I'm unsure which of the two is worse: At least we know that next year the pandemic will be behind us; whereas Gartner will continue to inflict upon us its annual tale of glaring omissions, inaccuracies and biased information - biased towards the highest bidder, I mean.

 

For anybody who has worked with and implemented SAP, Oracle and Workday (as this blogger has,) it is shocking, even hilarious, to see  Oracle ahead of Workday on the Vision dimension. Really? Who in their right mind would countenance for a split second that the vendor that has revolutionized HR technology by creating the first global cloud-based HR system can fall behind the vendor that for many years pooh-poohed the idea of the cloud? Completely insane.

 

When Gartner writes that "Oracle has a robust and global HCM offering with no major gaps" (italics added) it is laughable. The Oracle pseudo-cloud offering Fusion (which Gartner and Oracle try to disguise under the "Oracle Cloud HCM" label) has no Recruiting offering. Last time I checked, Recruiting (which also goes by the fancy new name of Talent Acquisition) was part and parcel of any HR remit. What about Taleo, the cloud-based offering that Oracle bought in 2012? (Read my analysis on that acquisition, Desperately Seeking SaaS: Oracle buys Taleo)  At Oracle's behest, Gartner is keeping silent on the topic because it is one of Oracle's dirtiest secrets: Taleo customers are leaving in droves to either SAP SuccessFactors or Workday, if not to best-of-breed systems. The last HRIS projects I worked on all had Taleo as their Recruiting tool (for either the whole multinational group or some subsidiaries) and they all decided to discontinue it. The haemorrhage is continuing apace but, again, mum's the word from Gartner. 

 

Another dirty little secret of Oracle's that Gartner won't tell you  about is that if you look at another even more (in)famous acquisition by Oracle, namely PeopleSoft, more PeopleSoft customers are moving to the cloud with Workday than with Oracle Fusion. If Oracle's cloud offering were so "robust" and "with no major gaps" as Gartner claims, why don't customers trust it and stay? Why do they move to Workday or SAP? 

 

In my 2018 rebuttal, I extensively documented Gartner's failings and motivation for such bias. It comes down to three words: CONFLICT OF INTEREST. Gartner's dirty little secret, well not really a secret to the cognoscenti, is that they get paid by vendors. And as we all know, nobody will bite the hand that feeds them. For over a decade I (and others) have been asking Gartner & Co. to stop getting paid from vendors. Would you accept from the government  a regulator taking money from the industries they regulate? Of  course not! Why would you then accept advice from a research firm who won't tell you how much money they make from the vendors they recommend? 

 

Of course, there are findings that I agree with, just like I agree with a fool when they say that water boils at 100° C. Glad to see that it took Gartner five years to recognize that Cornerstone has an HR offering. I was the first to predict that such an offering was coming:  first in 2015 (in my blog post

Cor(e)nerstone HR right around the corner ) and then in 2016 in Cornerstone, the newest kid on the global HRIS block. Well, I guess "better late than never" is a fair excuse.

 

As somebody who has worked on 7 Workday implementation projects, I can tell that Gartner's knowledge of this vendor is very sketchy - actually I doubt that they have deep knowledge of the other vendors either, since few if any Gartner analysts have ever dirtied their hands with actual HRIS implementations. If Gartner knew what it is talking about, it would have mentioned that Workday Learning is still WIP (I also agree about slow global Payroll progress). On the topic of Payroll, they could also have mentioned that there is no such thing as SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Payroll (I know, what a mouthful!): Why not call a duck a duck? Hosted SAP Payroll it is.

 

Since most of my 2018 rebuttals are still largely valid (technology may move fast, not the companies that produce it), there is little point in repeating myself. You can check that detailed analysis in  Gartner's HR Magic Quadrant: A (Strong) Rebuttal.

 

And next time you read research by Gartner & Co., take their findings with a pinch of salt. Actually, make it a barrel of salt - you'll do yourself a big favor.