Workday Rising Europe 2016 highlights: November 16th

Today was a day packed with announcements at Workday Rising Europe 2016, ranging from features just made available last September in Workday 27, new functionalities planned for Workday 28 and future plans for later dates.

The day started with the Executive Keynote introduced by Chano Fernández and Phil Wilmington, and starred by Workday's CEO Aneel Bhusri. Before moving to the announcements, they gave a quick overlook on how Workday is doing as a company. It can be summarised in one word: great. The Workday ecosystem is growing by almost any measure, including number of customers (both in HCM and Financials), revenue, employees and consultants.

This kind of growth can only be achieved through innovation, and here is where Dave Duffield's vision of the Power of One comes to play. You may have heard this multiple times, but it is true nevertheless. Having a single version for all customers has a tremendous impact in the agility in which Workday can implement enhancements and innovation.

During the keynote and some of the later break-up sessions, many of these current or future innovations were discussed and explained in detail. I'm pretty sure the importance of them will vary from customer to customer, but let me summarise the most significant ones from my point of view.

Externally Sourced Data Analytics

You may be well aware that Workday acquired Platfora back in July. This will bring Workday analytics to a new level, as this technology will allow customers to build analytics not only on information stored in Workday but also coming from external systems. This will bring incredible value to customers, which in many cases will be able to reduce their investment in third party BI solutions.

This capability is announced for Workday 29, although, as the rest of announcements, it is subject to the Safe Harbour Statement. Still, it is exciting that the Workday ecosystem may be just a few months away of enjoying these capabilities.

Workday Planning

One of the hottest new features included in Workday 27 is the new Workday Planning module. Particularly interesting is the new Worksheets feature, with allows user to make adjustments to planning in an spreadsheet like user interface. Worksheets are not only embedded into Workday applications, but also are synched with the data in them. This solved the eternal problem of handling different versions of spreadsheets, very well illustrated in this video.

The new Worksheets feature also comes bundled with an embedded instant messaging solution, that allows users to discuss about data in its context. This functionality will be extended to other modules in future releases.

Workday Learning

Another long awaited module that was released in Workday 27 is Workday Learning. This module is not just Workday's solution for the enterprise learning needs, but just a whole new approach to it. In Workday Learning, the creation of contents is collaborative and mobile. Every employee can contribute to the organisation by delivering her own contents, even using a mobile phone. Of course, through the business process framework, new contents can be reviewed and curated so that standards are followed.

Data as a Service

This is a new opt in service that Workday provides to its customers without any additional cost. It will allow customers to share some aggregated and secure data with other customers so their performance at several KPIs can be benchmarked against market standards. 

As much as 250 customers in the US have already opted in for this service since its announcement in September at last Workday Rising in Chicago. This is another show of the power of collaboration in the Workday community.

And much, much more

Many other announcements were made (Workday Assistant, Workday Designer, Campaigns, Onboarding, Customer Central, etc.), but honestly I want to take a little rest before tomorrow. Not only it will be packed with a lot of new sessions and networking, but we will also have the appreciation party, and I want to make the most of it!

Thanks for following and keep tuned.