Stan Swete
Stan Swete previously served as executive director of technology at Workday.
Agile isn't just for software development. Many types of critical projects undergo change, and Workday CTO Stan Swete writes that if businesses apply the agile approach they'll see success rates and time-to-value improve.
What has Workday learned from data analysis, and how have we used these insights to improve our delivery service? Workday CTO Stan Swete shares examples, and discusses how we’ll continue to get more insights from our data.
Following Workday's Technology Summit, Cushman & Wakefield CIO Craig Cuyar shared what he believes is most important for a strong customer-vendor partnership.
At Workday we’re focused on developing enterprise solutions that are easier to use, easier to change, and easier to integrate than traditional applications. When we started the company we thought “easier to change” meant two things. First, we envisioned cloud applications that our customers could configure without breaking our ability to upgrade their changes. Second, we wanted a platform that allowed us to continuously deliver new innovations to our customers. But, when it comes to change it turns out this is only half the story.
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.
In the last entry for this blog, I wrote about how Workday's technical architecture allows us to develop new products and updates with speed. Today I want to spend a little more time on the topic of speed because there is much more to the story than I shared last time, especially when it comes to the delivery of three updates to our suite of enterprise cloud applications a year. Moving with speed in enterprise software is as much about service delivery as it is about technical architecture.
At Workday, a large part of my time is spent explaining how we are different by design. There is a long list of points we make to describe our different approach, but at the core the main difference between Workday and traditional enterprise applications is how we’ve made the object model the core of our architecture.
There's nothing simple about heading up IT for a global company like Flextronics, but you can understand Dave's point. There is nothing simple about enterprise software either, but as you build it, you have to do your best to make it simple for customers. This concept is especially important now considering the rapid pace of change in enterprise software. In the past two Workday updates, we’ve delivered:
Before joining Workday I spent more than 20 years developing and supporting enterprise software. One of the most eye opening comparisons between SaaS and on-premise enterprise software is the positive difference that vendor-managed SaaS updates have for both vendors and customers.
Next week I’m heading down to L.A. for the annual InformationWeek500 conference. Sony Pictures, H.B. Fuller, and Flextronics will return this year to participate on a Workday customer panel, and Valspar will make its debut on the panel. Last year’s panel was a success, with IW500 attendees packing the room to ask our customers about their decisions to go with SaaS for their core HR systems.
When most people think about business intelligence (BI) they think about dedicated BI tools such as IBM’s Cognos, SAP’s Business Objects, and Oracle’s Hyperion products. You don’t hear them talk about applications that offer great BI.
When the Workday sales team met at headquarters last week to kick off the second half of a fantastic year, one of the topics we discussed was how team members should differentiate Workday’s SaaS from competitors’ “SaaS options” for on-premise software.