How Workday is Doubling Down on Data and Analytics

We’re living at a time when we’re awash in data, but short on ways to quickly turn that data into information we can act on with confidence. Much like the sailor in the classic Samuel Taylor Coleridge poem who laments, “Water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to drink,” the problem isn’t the quantity of data. The problem is that it’s not easily consumable. Too often, data is disparate and disconnected from essential business processes, making it difficult to use in a timely way.

At Workday, we’ve designed all of our products to give customers more visibility—into their workforces, financials, recruiting pipeline, and more. We’re extending this visibility with two new products, Workday Benchmarking and Workday Prism Analytics. The former lets you zoom out to see how your company’s performance compares with peers, and the latter lets you zoom in to use all the information relevant for your business, not just the data that lives inside your Workday system.

Why is this important? By getting up-to-date, data-driven insights into your most vital business metrics, and then seeing how these key indicators compare to companies of similar size or industry, decision-makers can better understand what issues are industry-wide, and what issues are specific to the company. In other words, the metrics you have about your business may be robust and informative, but without deeper analytical insights—achieved with greater context and direct comparison with similar companies—the “why” remains more elusive.

This is where our new offerings shine: Additional context around your data can help business leaders better diagnose the reasons behind particular numbers. And, these contextual insights can guide a smarter prioritization of business initiatives, best practices, and resource allocation.

Let’s dive a little deeper into how both these new offerings extend the power of Workday’s built-in analytics to help our customers gain even more insights into their data.

Workday Benchmarking, our first Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) offering, is now generally available. Workday Benchmarking can give you much-needed context by helping you understand your business’s strengths and weaknesses in relation to similar organizations.

Once customers choose to participate in the Workday Benchmarking service and select what data they’d like to contribute, their data is de-identified and added to a secure, aggregated dataset. In return, they get access to benchmarks representative of Workday’s participating customer community, and can see how they compare against peers with similar demographics, such as industry or company size.

Traditional benchmarking services deliver reports that are already out of date when used because they were built with data pulled several months earlier. Contrast that to Workday, where reliable, up-to-date data is always used. And, benchmarking results are surfaced in the Workday applications and dashboards that business users look at every day.

Because Workday Benchmarking lives in the same system as your HR and financial data, customers can leverage the collective power of Workday’s extensive community—including over 26 million workers across more than 1,800 global organizations. Armed with these insights, business leaders can take immediate action and contextual, data-driven decisions to optimize performance.

Our catalog of benchmarks is growing, and already includes HR benchmarks around workforce composition, turnover and retention, leadership and management effectiveness, and Workday usage, with future plans for benchmarks around financial management.

Workday Prism Analytics is now available, giving business leaders the tools they need to gain deeper insights into their workforce and financials. Workday Prism Analytics makes it possible to bring together external, non-Workday data with Workday data and apply analytics to the combined data to better understand the specific drivers of your most important metrics. In the end, it’s about knowing where you are so that you can better plan for your future.

Workday Prism Analytics includes data integration, self-service data preparation, data governance, and access to data through Workday’s reports, dashboards, and scorecards via a new high-performance analytics engine. These business insights can be shared across the organization so that users have access to the information they need to make faster and better decisions.

Our self-service data tools are designed to put information into the hands of the business leaders who make decisions about a company’s employee and financial health. And this all happens within Workday, in the place where users already spend their time.

The bottom line: Our customers want more ways to give decision-makers quick and easy access to the data that will help them lead their organizations to a better future—and better understand how their metrics compare with other companies. With Workday Benchmarking and Workday Prism Analytics, we’re giving companies the tools to mine richer insights inside their business, and better understand how those insights compare to industry peers. Data, like water, is everywhere, but helping you channel that data into actionable insight—rather than drowning in the deluge—is our goal here at Workday.