We are now rolling out Workday 19 to all of our customers. There is a ton of cool functionality in the update, but the enhancements creating the most interest among our customers are related to how we’ve re-imagined the traditional approach to software customization.
From the beginning, Workday’s approach is to make it possible for customers to configure and extend Workday to meet their specific needs, while avoiding the classic problems of customized software. We build on these capabilities with every update. In Workday 19, customers can now add custom fields to Workday objects, and create validations associated with custom fields. Customers also can now create their own labels. A simple example of this is a label that might better fit their brand or culture than what we offer as standard in Workday—such as “team member” instead of “worker.”
How exactly does configurability and extensibility differ from traditional software customization? This is one of my favorite topics of discussion with prospective customers, analysts, and colleagues. Here is a short video where I talk a bit more about our approach, and why it’s the best one for modern organizations.