Accenture Technology Vision
for Workday 2016
People First:
The primacy
of people in the
digital age
Workday: At the Heart of
the “People First” Agenda
This year’s Accenture Technology Vision
has “People First” as its rallying cry. Why’s
that so important? Because in the digital
era, the breakneck pace of technology
advancement can come at a price if it
detracts from rather than enhances the
indispensable contribution that people
make to driving value and innovation.
That’s not to say that technology isn’t
essential. It clearly is, and it’s becoming
more so all the time. But the insight from
the “People First” theme is that the greatest
value arises from the effective combination
of people and technology.
To fulfill their digital potential, businesses
need a workforce that thinks and acts
differently, and is empowered to do more.
To support that shift in culture requires
new ways of managing, measuring,
training, organizing, and assembling—
and above all empowering—talent to
innovate and outperform. In the old world,
financial management and human capital
management (HCM) systems were just that:
“back-office” systems for managing large
undifferentiated blocs of people data and
financial data.
Enabling people in the digital age
demands something more: it demands that
businesses deliver digital experiences to
employees that are equivalent to those
they enjoy and expect in their day-to-day
lives—using consumerization to create
differentiated employment experiences
and employee value propositions. They
must address the integration of work and
personal life, understanding how these two
worlds increasingly merge and overlap.
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It means accommodating the growth of a
global workforce that is increasingly made
up of project-based and self-organizing
teams, and requires seamless teamwork
beyond traditional boundaries. Operating
with an anytime, anyplace, mentality is
crucial. This includes providing mobile
access to on-demand services and digital
collaboration tools to embrace the
changing nature of work.
Digital businesses have to be more agile
and insight-driven. They have to deliver
data across organizational boundaries and
put the power to analyze and act on that
data in the hands of its people. They must
provide the intelligent tools that allow
employees to thrive, bringing new ways of
working and insights to their day-to-day
duties.
Today, companies like Workday, a leading
provider of enterprise cloud applications for
finance and human resources, are changing
the way organizations serve, nurture and
equip their employees. Service delivery
approaches are being completely reinvented
with consumer-based, increasingly “mobile
first” applications and interfaces that work
the way that people want to think, work,
and operate.
Below we examine the five key trends from
this year’s Technology Vision—Intelligent
Automation; Liquid Workforce; Platform
Economy; Predictable Disruption; and
Digital Trust—and provide examples
showing how Workday’s technologies
resonate with and play out in this year’s
analysis.
Trend 1: Intelligent Automation
We’re seeing organizations embracing
automation as a way to secure competitive
advantage. Intelligent automation, however,
fundamentally changes how people work.
Machines’ strengths and capabilities
complement their human “colleagues” and
change what’s possible. It’s a much broader
proposition than simply transferring tasks
from people to machines. By weaving
systems, data, and people together it
creates significant opportunities to do
things differently—and to do different
things.
The cloud is right at the heart of this
breakthrough. Its theoretically limitless
scale and unprecedented power uniquely
enables the proliferation of game-changing
analytics that feed the cloud enterprise
applications—like Workday—transforming
how companies operate.
For example, Workday HCM customers
easily automate formerly manual HR tasks
at scale across their enterprises. As they
do so, they free up HR-specialist resources
to focus their energies and expertise on
securing people-based outcomes that
deliver the greatest value to the business.
Embedded analytics and self-service
capabilities enable Workday customers
to shift routine decision-making and
administration from the hands of HR into
the hands of managers—improving the
experience for both. For example, for one
global communication company, after the
first four weeks of deployment, the new
self-service and HR tools caused employee
satisfaction to increase by more than 35
percent, and the adoption of dashboards
and automation for reporting helped
manager satisfaction increase by more than
25 percent.
This powerful shift is even more
pronounced (and valuable) when
automation creates the possibilities for
discovering new insights. For example,
Workday’s unified finance and HR
applications take the work out of sharing
people-related data and financial
information, allowing managers—who
often have the acumen, but have typically
lacked the tools or trust in data—to more
easily analyze data, glean insights and
create or change programs to support
business objectives. For instance, they’re
able to see the impacts of hiring decisions,
sales targets, and performance metrics
through one unified solution, and can
plan and deploy the right programs at
the speed required by digital businesses.
One private university in the U.S. that
recently implemented financials and HCM
expects to benefit from increased realtime, cross-functional reporting (such as
measuring personnel costs on grants) as
well as stronger controls and more efficient
workflow.
Another example comes from within
Accenture’s own Workday consulting
practice. Accenture built the Accenture
Client Enablement (ACE) tool for Workday
to enable what Accenture calls “hyper
collaboration.” The tool is a highly
intuitive, transparent, project management,
collaboration, and governance application
– powered by the cloud. It provides a
single environment across global teams,
seamlessly sharing key information all
in one place, in real time and through
personalized dashboards that are adaptable
to every team member’s specific role and
responsibilities.
The result? Better collaboration, tighter
governance, higher productivity, quicker
decision making and better, faster
outcomes—and ultimately project teams
that are more focused on strategic
implementation rather than administrative
activities. And with embedded content
mapped to the Accenture Delivery
Methodology for every project, new users
can be up and running immediately without
the requirement for additional training.
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Trend 2: Liquid Workforce
Leaders today understand that a changeready workforce, made up of an adaptable
and more fluid mix of people (from
contractors to re-skilled employees) is critical
to their organizations’ success. This is what
we call the “Liquid Workforce.” But building
and managing this new liquid workforce is
very different from traditional approaches. It
requires flexibility in everything from hiring,
to scheduling, to training, in order to react
quickly to changing business demands. This
new-style talent also brings very different
expectations. In order to attract, build, and
retain the liquid workforce that organizations
must have to prosper, they have to deliver
the right experiences and interactions in a
seamless, unified manner.
That means businesses need be able to
identify the new must-have capabilities for
their workforce, as well as the best ways to
attract, recruit, train, and retain people. As
work evolves to become a more fluid, projectbased experience—in which teams coalesce,
and disassemble, before moving onto new
projects—the ability to understand where
talent resides within their organization, and
beyond it, becomes increasingly critical.
With all these challenges, new systems for
success in the digital economy must combine
engagement, automation, insight, and record.
They need to have the power, flexibility,
and rapid scalability that only the cloud
can provide. Little wonder then that human
resource management solutions are following
the Workday lead and increasingly moving to
an as-a-service model.1
of which were consistent and some of
which were manual—for more than 115,000
employees across 37 countries and in six
languages. Accenture helped create and
convert the data into one global system of
record on Workday, providing the company
key insights into their workforce, as well
as creating a solution that can scale with
company growth.
Workday HCM helps companies address all
of these challenges by offering a seamless
experience from recruiting to onboarding to
enabling talent. In addition, its embedded
analytics and data visibility across a single
system helps companies quickly find the
available information they have built up
across their systems. This in turn enables
them to create a detailed picture of their
requirements for specific projects and
assignments. That end-to-end view of
the talent pipeline offers organizations
unparalleled insight into their key retention
risks on a project-by-project basis, and
supports effective build vs. buy strategies for
talent management.
In the digital era, speed of adaptation is
critical. Cloud-based applications are much
more flexible and easy to change than
traditional on-premise technologies. Given
the speed of change, Workday customers are
investing in change management capabilities
to support rapidly evolving business
strategies, people programs, and workforces.
Workday also offers a truly consumer-like
experience for users, which matches their
interactions with all of the other digital
services they use every day. But it’s not only
in routine HR administration that applications
and digital content can make a real difference.
Workday Learning, for example, moves away
from traditional “learning management
systems” by encouraging users to select
relevant training modules quickly and easily,
and access them in the most relevant
context. Notably, users can also upload
their own content and start communities of
interest around specific issues, challenges and
opportunities.
The need for one global system of record
is no longer a luxury, it is a requirement
for businesses to thrive and empower their
workforces. For example, a global automotive
parts company had more than 30 different
systems of record across the world—none
1. The Business Applications Landscape 2016 To 2020:
SaaS Disruption And Vendor Proliferation
February 1, 2016
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Trend 3: Platform Economy
Across every industry, we’re seeing leaders
unleashing the power of technology with
new technology platforms. Beyond that,
the new business models and ecosystems
that these platforms enable are driving
profound global macroeconomic change. In
the digital economy, these new ecosystems
provide a whole new way to create value.
This is equally true at the micro-level as
organizations leverage platform-based
solutions to solve complex, highly-evolving
operational needs.
customers can create pools of the talent
they need and then seamlessly source (from
traditional internal and external channels,
as well as social media integration with
LinkedIn, Glassdoor, Facebook, Indeed.
com, and others), interview, hire and
onboard. The system brings together
internal and external hires, which is critical
for organizations that rely on internal
mobility to grow a rich workforce. Similarly,
Workday Learning connects training needs
with various traditional and social channels.
It’s this philosophy that guides Workday’s
approach. For example, Workday built
its Recruiting and Learning capabilities
expressly as complete solutions designed
for every user in the process. For Recruiting,
rather than first understanding hiring
needs and then addressing talent pipelines,
Workday Recruiting integrates the needs
of candidates, hiring managers, recruiters,
recruiting teams, agencies and HR all
within a single technology. Starting from
workforce planning capabilities, Workday
Accenture helped a leading North American
energy company consolidate diverse legacy
HR solutions into a unified system, resulting
in a single source of truth for more than
9,000 employees and managers.. Accenture
executed the transition with live recruiting
candidate data—and went live during
the company’s peak recruiting cycle in a
seamless manner—optimizing the recruiting
process and the ability to make faster hires,
as well as providing improved data integrity
and enhanced security.
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Trend 4: Predictable disruption
Rapidly evolving digital ecosystems
are forming the next defining phase of
enterprise disruption. Digital ecosystems,
and the businesses within them, are
starting to bridge markets and redraw
industry maps.
Of course, there’s a threat from potentially
disruptive new entrants. But large
enterprises can also make use of their scale
and technology heft to take disruption
into their own hands. And cloud is a key
enabler here. By operating as part of a realtime community in a multi-tenant cloud
environment, enterprises are able to drive a
more disruptive agenda at speed and scale.
This was simply unattainable in the onpremise world.
Those collaborative opportunities,
empowered with a common platform, open
up new horizons of business value. Just as
Workday Recruiting is integrated with a
number social recruiting sites, it connects
to a host of providers along the value chain
such as assessment, background checking,
advertising, search, mobile recruiting, and
analytics vendors.
This approach—having a network of
partners that are an extension of its
business and a way to create a platform
on which others can also discover and
generate value—is now moving into new
areas. For instance, for the educational
sector, Workday Student helps higher
education institutions meet targeted
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enrollment goals through data-driven
insights related to a potential student’s
academic success at their institution.
It’s seamlessly unified with Workday
Financial Management and Workday
HCM, and is a mobile-first system that
provides end-to-end student and faculty
lifecycle information to help colleges and
universities advance their institutions and
enable student success.
To get an idea of its potential, imagine if
every student at a U.S. university used
Workday Student to support their progress
from university application to admission. By
using that information in combination with
existing data on university employees, the
universities themselves are able to predict
and plan their own resource allocation far
more effectively than they could have ever
done before.
Looking ahead, Workday Student will not
only connect students with university
systems, but also provide greater visibility
into curriculum management, student
records, academic advising, financial aid,
and student financials.
As the connection between university
and student continues to strengthen,
once isolated processes and competitive
organizations will become further linked
and work together to create benefits that
can only be dreamed of today.
Trend 5: Digital Trust
As every area of business digitizes, big
opportunities follow, however, so do big
risks. Each digital advancement imperils
business in new ways. In this world, digital
trust is foundational. Without it, businesses
can’t operate and make use of the data
underpinning everything they want to
do. Trust means more than just security
(although that’s obviously critical). It also
entails privacy and ethical handling at every
stage of customer and employee data.
Trust is integral to Workday’s business
model and to its ongoing success. Workday
was created a cloud first and cloud only
service from inception to address the
inherent risks of providing an internet
facing application storing and processing
some of the most sensitive and regulated
data on the planet. Its founders understood
that to be successful, security, privacy and
compliance must be woven into the fabric
of its culture.
A common misperception, however, is that
the cloud creates added security risks.
This is particularly true when it comes to
Workday Financial Management, which
is built to equip organizations with the
insight they need to operate in a complex,
competitive, and fast-paced business
environment. Additionally, trust is integral
to everything we do at Accenture. We
recently implemented the full suite of
Workday Financial Management for the
18,000 employees of the private university
mentioned previously.
In fact, companies are using cloud
applications to increase security compliance.
What’s more, customer trust is at the heart
of many cloud-based solutions, which are
fundamental to creating deeper customer
relationships across entire value chains.
People and technology doing
more every day
Given the strength of Workday’s flexibility, breadth of functionality, and deep analytics
capabilities, companies have access to greater insights on how to adapt and grow in
today’s changing business landscape. Making data and analytics tools available to
more people, across geographies and organizational boundaries, empowers business
to embrace the “People First” vision and do more. But the real power of the Workday
approach, and cloud technologies, is the flexibility to adapt and scale its platform to
whatever comes next.
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About Accenture
Accenture is a leading global professional services company,
providing a broad range of services and solutions in strategy,
consulting, digital, technology and operations. Combining unmatched
experience and specialized skills across more than 40 industries and
all business functions—underpinned by the world’s largest delivery
network—Accenture works at the intersection of business and
technology to help clients improve their performance and create
sustainable value for their stakeholders. With approximately 373,000
people serving clients in more than 120 countries, Accenture drives
innovation to improve the way the world works and lives. Visit us at
www.accenture.com.
Contact
Beth Boettcher
Global Workday Practice Lead
Managing Director, Accenture
[email protected]
accenture.com/techvisionworkday
accenture.com/workday
#techvision2016
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