Workday on lessons learned from Iowa and Maine project woes Workday CEO Carl Eschenbach insists more than 90 percent of the SaaS HR and finance application vendor's rollouts are a success, putting aside the company's high profile difficulties in Maine and Iowa state-level projects. Speaking to The Register during the vendor's Workday Rising EMEA conference in Amsterdam in December, …
While I suspect Workday is just as much of a mess as any other product (having only been on the consumer end of it), the blame also probably falls on those trying to recreate an arcane custom mess rather than going with the vanilla solution which is probably fine with a bit of configuration.
Again and again with other stuff I get lumbered with messes where people have tried to be clever or just not understood, produced their own special setup and turned it into a mess, when just going with plain default works absolutely fine and does everything.
Starting from scratch might not be perfect but at least you're not Pavlov's dog blindly recreating the 4th generation port of a system that started life on a serial terminal instead of understanding why you're doing it.*
*As I enter my holidays into an HR setup that implements stuff that I first saw on its distant predecessor VAX, knowing virtually no-one remembers it is only that way because of where it started rather than being a good idea.
"While I suspect Workday is just as much of a mess as any other product (having only been on the consumer end of it), the blame also probably falls on those trying to recreate an arcane custom mess rather than going with the vanilla solution which is probably fine with a bit of configuration."
Honest question: You don't think that an equal proportion of companies can make a complete hash of a vanilla ERP implementation? After all, what vanilla means in this context is that the client has to adopt processes that match the new system, and I'm guessing that there's NOBODY amongst the ERP vendors who offers fully mapped and resource-costed business process maps. And if there aren't those mapped and costed processes, then you can install the most perfect IT build* and the business will still struggle.
* And of course even the vanilla install won't be perfect - the systems still need to interface with all of the clients existing software stack and company or industry-specific software, and they need to fit with whatever godawful hosting and support model the client are tied into.
There used to be jobs for "system analysts", who delved into the how and why of existing business systems, in order to derive the requirements of a new or replacement computerised system.
Their job duties seem to have morphed into dealing with only the computer aspect of business systems.
Maine still uses the legacy systems that were intended to be retired by Workday. They have not implemented Workday. I know several people involved in the original project, and they have not been tapped to start work again. It's disconcerting because at least one of the legacy systems relies on aging technology and a single programmer who would like to retire (according to this article from 2022 https://www.pressherald.com/2022/06/07/state-hires-new-contractor-to-complete-long-delayed-software-upgrade/ ).
Importantly, your article quote below cuts sort an important part of the sentence:
Maine now runs an HR system called PRISM, "built using Workday and other software as needed to meet our complex requirements," according to its website.
The full sentence only predicts what might be in the future:
"PRISM will be built using Workday and other software as needed to meet our complex requirements..."
It hasn't been built. Maine still use the legacy system for payroll, which was supposed to be the biggest reason to go with Workday. The PRISM website and intro video was posted in May 2023. It hasn't been updated. Honestly, I'd love for someone to dig into this. Maybe Workday is the problem, maybe the project management is the problem. But Maine still doesn't have a modern payroll system for it's 12,000 employees.
> Maine still doesn't have a modern payroll system for it's 12,000 employees.
It was not that long ago that the state of New Jersey was buying odd-lot punch cards to keep its payroll going. They have always made payday but a lot of routine Purchasing.. well when I was hired NJ made a point of paying early for best price, and by the time I left my vendors were wining about payments in arrears.
There was a New Plan but the point of entry system (via MSIE) was obviously tying-up all resources meaning the backend may still have been a 1963 Burroughs. Unless Chuck re-emulated an older machine on a 1980 H-P mini.
From the title: "Nine in ten of our implementations are a success, CEO Carl Eschenbach tells The Reg"
One can only imagine exactly how well it would it go if the CEO of Boeing, Kelly Ortberg, said, "Nine out of ten of the flights of Boeing aircraft are a success."
“But rather than reducing headcount, users were more likely to use expected productivity gains to redeploy staff to more "strategic" work, he says. Eschenbach says the Workday's AI models are built with data from around 80 percent of its customers which signed up to an "innovation agreement" that allows data to be shared with the vendor. However, identifiable data can only be seen by the customer, he says.”
Sounds like more lies, though I’m sure the c-suites being presented to are all Beavis and Butthead at this along with the Workforce Sales Teams.
The AI Training agreement, sounds like a slam dunk GDPR/CCPA data violation … on the HR side.
when I was in early IT training to code COBOL, the lecturer stated that out of the box software was the future as it would be cheaper, faster, tested as so on. Perhaps it is age, but given how many of these enterprise systems expensively fail, maybe just getting real Systems Analysts in the build a data dictionary, map work/data flows and build a bespoke solution with all source code printed out, archived and woe betide any PHB or entitled staffer wanting changes just for them RBN instead of after post implementation reviews, and upgrade scheduled if required in say 6 months. So often locally built applications worked the way the business worked rather than rebuilding the business processes to an alien ideal.
time effort and energy invested scoping it at the beginning, "
3 things IMHO no outsourced UK government IT project (HMG or LA) has ever done.
So much more profitable to discover shortfalls in the scoping which the con-sultants/con-tractors will (regrettably) have to charge for further down the line.
How about "Oh it was in scope but you didn't notice it? You pick up the tab for your incompetence"
Icon because....
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