Top 10 Workday Blogs of 2017

It’s time to look back on 2017—a year that will be remembered for brave women speaking out, and intense discourse about political leadership. Brexit and U.S. tax reform. Artificial intelligence and digital currency. Heartbreaking tragedies, and stories of strength and hope.

Here at Workday, we live at the intersection of business trends and how technology can best serve organizations and people. Through our blog, we’ve strived to cover stories in these areas and more.

Today we’re highlighting some of our most read and shared blogs from this year, as well as some staff favorites. These blogs reflect how people are working to make a better world, insights from business leaders, and Workday’s proudest contributions to our customers and industry.

In no particular order, here are our picks for the top 10 Workday Blogs of 2017:

In all aspects of society, change doesn’t happen unless people speak up and take action. That’s why it’s important to keep up the discussion about gender inequality in the tech industry and to recognize that more commitment from businesses and their leaders is needed to solve this problem. We brought together four female executives—Olga Braylovskiy from Intuit, Vicki Huff Eckert from PwC, and Leighanne Levensaler and Christine Cefalo from Workday—to share best practices on how companies can attract more women into technology roles.

There’s a significant opportunity divide in the U.S., and it continues to widen. In metropolitan areas, where some enjoy fulfilling jobs and comfortable housing, others are struggling to make ends meet. We were inspired by our interview with Year Up CEO Gerald Chertavian, who is passionate about building bridges that lead more young adults out of poverty and into successful careers. We are honored to partner with Year Up through the Workday Foundation. Chertavian shares how a young man he met 30 years ago inspired him to start an organization that has changed the lives of countless people.

Since Workday was founded in 2005, we’ve been dedicated to providing a financial management application designed for today’s world. This year, we were incredibly honored to be named a leader in the first-ever Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Core Financial Management Suites for Midsize, Large, and Global Enterprises. This recognition as a market leader validates the commitment we’ve made to deliver a true cloud system for financial management and it affirms we are doing what matters most—creating value for our customers.

Ask any group of people whether 2017 was a happy year for them, and you’ll likely get a variety of answers. Happiness is often a personal thing. Yet at the same time, argues Shawn Achor, long-term happiness is a team sport. Achor, a New York Times bestselling author of “The Happiness Advantage,” speaker, and happiness researcher, delved into this idea and more in an interview at Workday Rising. On a path that started in the depths of his own depression, Achor has dedicated his life to giving people practical advice on how to be happier. To achieve true long-term happiness, Achor says we need to remember that we are, at heart, social animals.

This year, one of our most exciting news announcements was the opening of the Workday Cloud Platform. As our CEO and Co-Founder Aneel Bhusri writes, the question, “When will Workday open up its cloud platform?” is one of the most frequent ones our company leaders have received over the years from customers, analysts, and employees. By opening up the Workday Cloud Platform and entering the Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) market, Workday intends to enable customers and our broader ecosystem to use our platform services to build custom extensions and applications that can significantly enhance what organizations are able to accomplish with Workday.

Corporate culture remained a hot topic this year. Smart businesses know why: a healthy and positive culture is the foundation of continuing success. The role of the CFO isn’t mentioned much in discussions of corporate culture, but it should be. Over the years, the CFO role has evolved from one of accounting oversight to an influential partner on the executive team, sharing responsibility for nurturing a healthy, growing company. In this blog, Workday CFO Robynne Sisco talks about the meaning of culture, how she and her team influence culture, and measuring its impact to the bottom line.

Artificial intelligence (AI) will only continue to make headlines in 2018. The opportunities are exciting and seemingly endless, yet us humans are wary of the implications—will robots take our jobs? To help our customers navigate an evolving AI landscape and gain a framework for their own strategies around intelligent automation, we have developed a four-stage maturity model that outlines how Workday believes intelligent technologies will impact the enterprise—moving from making today’s operations more efficient, to reorganizing operations around the unique possibilities intelligent technologies will offer in the near future.

In a world where reality sometimes lags behind our ideals, we take inspiration from businesses that stick to their values. Patagonia, with its extremely loyal customers and passionate employees, lives by its values of environmental stewardship and grassroots activism. Dean Carter, head of shared services at Patagonia, talks about what life is like at the “un-company,” and how Patagonia has always remained focused on culture, in both good times and bad.

We can all agree that the world has changed a great deal in the last 30 years and that a big driver of that change has been technology. Nearly 50 percent of the companies that were part of the Fortune 500 and FTSE 100 in 2000 no longer appear in those rankings. It seems crazy that technology itself should be a barrier to change, but for many businesses that is precisely what happened and continues to happen today. This blog discusses why we need to leave the past behind and realize the power of financial transformation.

Last but not least, we wrap with a blog on the importance of staying focused on the future and who will be leading it. To retain the best and brightest, companies must find a way to keep dynamic and inquisitive employees motivated and engaged. While this new workforce will ultimately create major shifts in the fabric of organizations, most of us are still in the early days of this evolution. But, we can begin with a few positive changes now. This blog from Workday Chief People Officer Ashley Goldsmith highlights some ideas we’ve been pursuing here at Workday.