As a Workday Community member, how do you feel you’ve impacted product roadmaps?
Early on, we talked about all the challenges that we’d had in our prior environment with a different company: One example is that we weren’t able to hide certain pieces of payroll data from groups that shouldn’t be able to see everything. For instance, managers don’t need to know an employee’s withholding order. Workday took that whole concept and worked segment-based security into a number of other areas.
What usually happens is you get some discussion that starts off in an area or feature that’s very important and particular to you, but the people at Workday think bigger than that—they abstract it up several levels of value, and then use that idea across the whole platform for everyone’s benefit.
What’s your overall experience been with other Workday customers—online and in person?
There seem to be many Workday customers who are willing to help other customers out, especially new ones. I saw a lot of that happening at Workday Rising this year. There was a group lunch featuring a discussion on analytics, where a lot of people who have been with Workday for a long time, including Workday employees, participated in group activities and showed new customers the ropes.
I’ve been to other conferences where people sort of get annoyed by the new customers, because they don’t want to rehash the things they learned when they started. I don’t see that happening with Workday customers. It’s a “welcome to the family” type of thing.
Do you get business insights on Workday Community from people who are in different industries, or, are any insights necessarily more industry-specific?
Many of us are dealing with similar issues across industries and geographies. I’ve always felt that there’s tremendous strength in diversity of opinion. For example, all of your body’s limbs are set up as sensors to determine certain things. To walk, your left leg has to send sensory input to the brain. The same thing holds true of organizations—in the best organizations, each person is sending sensory input into the decision-making process. And, we should be looking outside of our organizations to get as much, and as varied, input as possible. So yes, I get all sorts of insights from all sorts of Workday Community members.