I have been in Chicago for the last three days attending the annual Workday conference, which they call Rising. It was exciting and today I will be flying back and looking forward to another exciting event – the Inauguration of Dr Paula Johnson, the College’s 14th president. Paula has already brought so much energy, optimism  and enthusiasm to the College and I am really looking forward to the new beginning.

It has been a while since I have gone to a vendor sponsored conference like the Rising. There were something like 7000 attendees. There was the usual entertainment, receptions, too much food and keynotes. But I attended some really useful presentations that were well done. You can see my tweets here.

The conference attendees were predominantly from areas other than higher ed. Workday’s Higher Ed footprint is relatively small but growing fast, but I was surprised to hear how institutions like Georgetown has been a Workday customer for the past 4 years or so. One thing that was common across the board based on my conversations with others is that the transition from the older systems to Workday was painful, but everyone is so relieved that they made the decision to move.

The Workday student module is live and ready for prime time. In other words, it is no longer something that people were speculating about. I was excited to see how it worked and its resemblance to the human resources and finance functionalities that we will be implementing first. During a panel discussion with five institutions that will be the early adopters of the student module (mostly large community Colleges), the presenters made it abundantly clear that Workday listened to their ideas and requests and incorporated them to a large extent in the product. And when they could not do something you asked for, they told you that. I am more optimistic about Workday’s ability to listen and incorporate great ideas into the product much more easily than other products for one reason – “The Power of One“. Too many times our requests go nowhere with other vendors because it is extremely difficult for them to do it with the old technology and platform they are built on.

Workday philosophy is a single code base for everyone, combined with the fact that they are using some of the most current technologies. These are key to extensibility. Object oriented, in memory model means additional methods and properties can be added with much more ease that the traditional database approach. I don’t want to trivialize this, but all I want to point out is that extensibility is much easier under the new paradigm, that’s all. The Power of One has a problem in that, as a user, we don’t have a lot of choices that we currently enjoy. In my mind, this is an advantage and not a challenge. But that is a discussion for another day.

I got to see in action, Registration, advising, financial aid, student billing, curriculum development and maintenance, student academic risk detection and many more. They all come together nicely – a single consistent user interface that will take some time for those who have not used Workday interface to get adjusted to, but it is the kind of interface we aspire for. Power of one means the same functionality is available on Mobile devices just the same way they are on other devices. Analytics is extremely powerful. Again, all of these are self contained in one system. It is indeed the case that not everything everyone wants is delivered, but through configuration and additional reports and dashboards as well as Webservices to pull the data elsewhere, I think we will have a lot of possibilities.

I was very impressed with what they intend to provide in terms of additional security at the system level as well as in terms of roles. The granularity with which we can control things in Workday will definitely be an advantage, but it also requires a lot of training and care.

All in all, I found it to be a very productive three days and it was great to hang out with some of the other Higher Ed colleagues.