How Workday Helps Customers Enable Digital Success
Our Chief Customer Officer Sheri Rhodes shares her best practices to help customers realize the full value of their digital investments.
Our Chief Customer Officer Sheri Rhodes shares her best practices to help customers realize the full value of their digital investments.
Our customers’ success, and their overall experience, is my top priority. One of the most important parts of my role is ensuring that we’re delivering meaningful value to our customers throughout every step of their journey with Workday. This includes enabling them to deploy with confidence and successfully adopt Workday technology. We recognize that organizations can get caught in the “acceleration gap,” the place where resources, skills, and capabilities can’t keep up with the rapid pace of change—and we’re here to help.
Unlocking the full value and power of an investment requires knowing how to put that technology to work and get the most out of it. Here are my top five tips on how to do exactly that.
1. Navigate deployment with confidence. In a world where time equals money, the efficient and seamless deployment of new solutions is essential. However, deploying new technology can be overwhelming due to evolving workforce needs, high expectations from stakeholders, and the urgency to produce a return on investment. The added complexity when companies undertake multiple transformation initiatives simultaneously exacerbates the situation.
Similar to how a rookie athlete wouldn’t be expected to make a game-winning shot immediately after coming off the bench, it’s unrealistic to expect a seamless and speedy deployment without help from others. Having a coach who provides you with personalized, expert guidance based on thousands of successful deployments can help you launch with confidence. The comprehensive expertise, support, and education included in Workday Success Plans, for example, can help you successfully navigate through deployment and beyond.
2. Connect the dots between your business goals and technology capabilities. The potential of technology to revolutionize businesses is evident, but determining how it will specifically transform your organization can be a challenge. It is not uncommon for businesses to struggle with this; however, when they are able to connect those dots, the benefits can be significant.
According to Deloitte, the alignment of specific technology investments with clear digital transformation strategies resulted in a value impact that was twice as great as strategies alone—and 3.5 times greater than change capabilities alone. It is important to identify which capabilities align best with your business objectives, then build a feature adoption plan to help accelerate the intended business transformation.
3. Elevate the skills of your teams to achieve greater independence and productivity. In order to unlock the full power of a technology investment, it’s crucial to understand how it works and what it can do. However, this can be a difficult task for teams with limited time and resources, leaving them with two unappealing options: outsourcing every configuration request to another department or third-party vendor, or attempting to navigate complex user manuals themselves.
Fortunately, in the digital age, a third option has emerged: providing teams managing technology with engaging and accessible on-demand learning opportunities. This allows teams to develop their own expertise, boost their confidence in managing the technology, and quickly address any issues or questions they may have.
Not only does enabling teams to build and expand their technology expertise aid them to tackle immediate needs and save time, it can also have far-reaching benefits such as increased employee engagement, productivity, improved self-reliance and a culture of continuous learning. Providing individuals with the necessary skills to work efficiently with new technologies also enables them to take on more meaningful work, freeing up their capacity for other important tasks.
4. Adapt to keep pace with innovation. Economic uncertainties, market disruptions, competitive pressures, and rapid technology innovations are shifting market landscapes faster than ever, prompting organizations to seek technology advantages that allow them to respond quickly and with confidence. However, the reality is that many organizations struggle to keep up with the pace of change.
Adaptability is critical for organizations, allowing them not only to capitalize on new opportunities, but also to avoid being caught off guard in the race for competitive advantage. It’s crucial to cultivate and strengthen adaptability continuously rather than only tackling it when an opportunity or innovation arises. Getting expert guidance on how to utilize your technology investment to best manage change, reduce risk, and plan for growth is vital. So when you’re faced with change, your team has the necessary skills and knowledge to make swift, organized, and educated adjustments to respond with confidence.
5. Get the technical support you need, so you can focus on the road ahead. When an incident or roadblock arises, it’s not only frustrating—it can also be costly and disruptive to the business. While having a team of support staff can help address these challenges, it comes at a cost. As a result, many organizations struggle to find the right balance between sufficient technical support and controlling operating expenses.
Cloud-native platforms offer a solution to this balancing act by providing embedded, automated processes and a more resilient underlying architecture than legacy on-premise systems. However, even with the cloud, organizations still require comprehensive, reliable on-demand support to ensure smooth operations. Because focusing on the road ahead is hard to do if you don’t first have peace of mind.
To learn more about maximizing value from digital investments, check out “Unlocking the Full Value of Your Technology Investment.”
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