The advent of consumer technologies is disruptive, creating new business expectations for HR to be real-time and mobile: Managers expect access to utilize daily “moments of productivity” while in line for a latte, while executives want to access real-time workforce data on their tablet. The forces driving this digital transformation via a simplified and improved work experience are pervasive and will be persistent for decades to come. These new expectations are creating an urgent paradigm shift for HR, but a digital HR transformation is achievable if leveraging a proven path and technology solution.
Calibrating Terminology and Purpose
Let’s first establish a common framework on the concept of “HR Digital Transformation.” An HR Digital Transformation uses social, mobile, cognitive, and cloud technologies as an integrated platform to enable a frictionless user experience that facilitates collaboration amongst an organizations’ employees, managers, executives, and candidates.
HR digital transformation = enabling business operations with consumer grade technologies
There are hundreds of organizations currently operating with a transformed digitized HR function enabled by Workday. The opportunity statements and business case drivers presented here are the proven first-hand experiences from a decade of deploying Workday for a spectrum of organizations spanning medium enterprise to the Global Fortune 100. Use this paper as a playbook to initiate executive conversations on the macro trends reshaping human capital management and to tailor a business case to transform enterprise functions.
Aligning on the HR Digital Transformation Opportunity
The traditional role of HR as a patriarchal administrator enforcing policies as the single-threaded access point to back office systems and disjointed processes undermines the strategic value and potential of the function. As an organization’s employee advocate function, HR is uniquely positioned to be a catalyst for enterprise digitization. There is an urgent need for the offices of the CHRO and the CIO to unite and lead the charge to deliver a higher standard of Human Capital Management solutions.
Organizations need human capital management technology to…
Create people capacity
Today’s workforce is complex: The rise of the gig-economy allows organizations to engage contractors and traditional employees to identify the best possible mix of workers to satisfy different business needs. Organizations are trending to more project-focused matrixed, interconnected, and flexible teams assembled to solve specific challenges, then be redeployed within the organization or back into the workforce. This new workforce dynamic creates new challenges and opportunities in human capital management.
Innovate culture + career experience
Corporate culture must evolve: There are four generations in the workforce (Baby Boomers, Generation X, Millennials, and Centennials), creating a need for increased HR focus on inclusion and shared beliefs to tie these diverse workers together. Millennials made up 33% of the workforce in 2017 (will be 70% in 2027), but organizations have already experienced their disruptive expectations of rapid career growth, sense of purpose, collaboration, flexibility, empowerment, and innovation.
Unify transactions + reporting real-time
The Internet-of-Things (IOT) is here: In our IOT inter-connected world where Apple, Google, and Amazon have redesigned life as we know it. Corporate systems now have the same expectations to be web-enabled + real-time + integrated + easy. For years organizations have seen technology enable real-time manufacturing supply chain and inventory management, and now that same transformation opportunity exists for real-time talent supply chain and human capital management through the advent of cloud based, unified HR transactional and reporting software.
The current wave of digitization, and therefore democratization, of human capital information is rapidly moving the HR value proposition from human capital administrator to curator: Analyzing and show-casing secure, real-time content to enable strategic business decisions is the future of the HR function that triggers a domino effect of transformation within the business and ultimately to shareholders.
Visualizing the organizational impact of HR digital enablement
To put a final point on the HR Digital Transformation opportunity that Workday enables, invert the enablement concepts to test the argument:
Can Shareholders receive maximum value from a Business that cannot make proactive informed decisions on cost or growth initiatives – especially for organizations where their largest capital expense is their workforce; from an HR Function that does not have tools nor time to proactively analyze and manage human capital; against a Workforce who cannot easily access data systems that facilitate core enterprise management functions? Probably not.
Building a Measurable Case for Change
Building the business case requires inextricably linked HR and technology executive sponsorship starting with the CHRO and CIO, but extending throughout the organization. To be successful, an HR Digital Transformation cannot be “just another system conversion”: It requires a holistic approach to baseline current state costs, risks, and user experiences, against an agreed target state vision for transformative change across the organization.
Business cases can be tricky because there is "no line item" to account for things that aren't being done currently, that would be possible after the investment; on the surface, doing nothing is always cheaper than doing something.
Defining the HR Experience Target Future State Vision
Before whipping out ledger paper and a calculator to start cost analysis, first align the organization on the target future state that must by costed and assessed for risk. It is critical to engage line-of-business leaders and their HR business partners on an assessment to calibrate current state pain points and to validate how much opportunity there is to make their work-lives simpler. When thinking about this “Experience Analysis,” consider it from multiple perspectives:
This Experience Analysis step is tricky, especially for the functional areas that report to the CHRO and CIO. It is hard to be vulnerable because egos are involved, and people generally avoid conflict. To increase the odds of having a productive and engaging interaction by HR customer types, attempt to facilitate a common vision for transformative change and their ability to influence the direction of simplifying work-life:
Two things should shape the target future state HR experience: Customer Experience Analysis and Workday delivered capability.
There is no need to engage a consultancy to facilitate target future state business process mapping, chewing up several months and hundreds of thousands of dollars doing process redesign. A more effective use of time to set and calibrate a target future state vision is to network with installed customers who have successfully achieved an HR Digital Transformation on the cloud technology, and this is a CRITICAL step if a cloud technology selection is still in-process.
This step in the evaluation process to learn from installed customers and product experts also provides a glimpse at the organizational attitude to move to a true multi-tenant Software-as-a-Service Cloud solution, which is the only way to confidently and efficiently achieve a consumer grade technology experience of enterprise applications. If there are organizational leaders or business stakeholders beating the drum and chanting “our organization is so complex and unique,” then it’s important to flush-out a potential Catch-22 argument by evaluating if that complexity is inherited from the disparate complex technology landscape that currently provides enterprise functions. There are more than a dozen Global Fortune 100 organizations who have successfully deployed Workday and are currently running their businesses with more control and insight than ever before: Allow those success stories to help shape your HR Digital Transformation vision.
Quantifying the Improvement Opportunity
No business case would be complete without Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to set objective baseline and target results for enterprise systems and functional services. Collecting the enterprise system KPIs from the cloud technology vendors is a straight-forward exercise that does not practically allow for negotiation, since multi-tenant SaaS System Availability spans multiple clients who by default share the same KPI targets. The cloud technology vendors all tout similar best-in-class KPI targets related to System Response Time and System Availability; however, carefully inspect the definitions of System Availability, especially the definition of “Scheduled Down Time” as some cloud vendors suggest that it’s acceptable to introduce additional hours of Scheduled Down-Time with only 48 hours of notice. This KPI calibration is another CRITICAL step if a cloud technology selection is still in-process.
Next focus on the KPIs for functional services provided to the business and assess how an HR Digital Transformation would impact the level of service provided to the business. These functional KPIs are typically a set of measures for accuracy, turn-around-times, and customer satisfaction by enterprise function (Help Desk, Payroll, Benefits, Recruiting, Reporting). In the world of legacy enterprise operations, common KPI failures originate from data collisions between current, future, and retro-dated transactions that require manual reconciliation across disparate systems. These common KPI failures immediately resolve themselves by moving to Workday’s unified solution and removing the large volume of interfaces and reconciliation routines. Improving KPI results by eliminating known failure points simultaneously increases HR customer satisfaction and reduces cost-to-serve.
Lining up the Facts and Data
When thinking about the cost assessment, bring in the CFO to carefully consider the investment and accounting opportunities created by a move to cloud technology. It’s obvious to start with the hard-dollar costs, but soft-dollar opportunity costs should also be included, as they are expected from most investments: To effectively build out the opportunity costs, leverage the learnings from the Experience Analysis. When assessing costs, calculate Return on Invested Capital vs. only focusing on [(Current State + Deployment Costs) < Future State Costs]. Business cases can be tricky because there is “no line item” to account for things that aren’t being done currently, that would be possible after the investment; on the surface, doing nothing is always cheaper than doing something.
Probe for the full cost of ownership to update and operate multiple redundant systems; for example, how many hours are spent reconciling HR data inconsistency errors with both external vendor systems and internal systems.
All cloud based HCM solutions are not the same. Ideally before creating the business case, first select the technology solution that best handles organizational business requirements vs. incorrectly assuming that the effort to deploy and enable change management will be identical across technology solutions.
Beyond comparing the current state vs. future state ledger, it’s critical that the organization buys into the bigger picture of what an HR Digital Transformation enables: Revisit the graphic “Visualizing the organizational impact of HR digital enablement” as a guide to weave together the organization’s unique narrative and value opportunity to be included in the business case proposal.
To “put a cherry on top” of a Workday enabled Business Case for HR Digital Transformation, engage the Workday Value Management Team to quantify cost and outcome targets, based on results from hundreds of organizations who have already successfully deployed Workday. There are dozens of interesting data points within the Workday Value Management Team Business Case Tool to quantify value realization from efficiency gains and business effectiveness drivers that validates a proven solution through actual customer results.
Realizing the Vision
Through the process of building this business case with a unified C-Suite and business stakeholders, the effort to socialize, refine, and build support for the change is more than half way done; hopefully, approval to embark on an HR Digital Transformation and introduce consumer grade technologies to business operations will soon be “only a vote and a budget cycle away.” Transformation is, by definition, a significant body of work that will fundamentally redefine the status quo, but there are hundreds of organizations who have already made the journey and are generous to share their success tips and “If I had it to do all over again” learnings. Eventually, every organization will need to make the shift to modern, consumer grade technologies, the only real questions to answer are:
While there are several cloud enabled enterprise technologies on the market, they are not all designed equally: All of the business outcomes described in this paper are current realities for organizations who optimally deployed Workday. The next decision to select a deployment partner who will both listen and direct, is just as important as the decision of which technology can best realize the target end state vision.
Workday does an exceptional job of training their Certified Service Providers and requiring them to follow the same Workday Deployment Methodology, but not all Workday Certified Service Providers have the same business models or motivation. Invisors is a boutique provider of Workday Human Capital Management, Workday Financial Management, and Workday Planning Deployment Services, exclusively focused on Workday deployments for customers who want to be self-sufficient upon go-live.