Last week was the time of the year again - the Workday spring Update was being made available on the companies servers. It's now the 19th time that Workday has made available an Update of their latest products - on a metronome like pace. That in itself is a fact worth congratulating the company for.
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[For the rest of this post I will only focus on the HCM side of the Update.]
So what was in Workday Update 19?
When you compare it with the large internet properties though, it's significantly different, as e.g. Facebook releases Home when they are ready, it's basically release when ready vs. release on schedule.
Release on schedule has the disadvantage, that the vendor needs to release something, even when there may not be so many value creation features in the release than you would usually see. That problem gets acerbated, when vendors need to split their development teams because of development projects, that need more time than the regular release cycle and with that reduce their capacity for building features for the immediate next release.
The challenge for all SaaS vendors in a similar scenario is, that the regular releases create trust in their ability to release more functionality, and many - like Workday - have made this a key differentiator vs. the dinosaurs of the industry. But that makes them also a slave to the cadence.
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And - not surprisingly - the feature richness of Workday updates fizzles out a bit... as predicted in a recent post.
Workday CTO Stan Sweete confirmed again, that development resources are split 50 / 50 between HCM and Financials. On the HCM side, the new recruitment module will keep large capacities of the HCM development team busy, and while the support for the Workday BigData offering will be most likely in the foundation / platform - it will need exposure and expertise from the applications, notably HCM.
It will be also key for Workday, to add all the custom fields they can now, so they will be part of the upcoming BigData update. Customer won't be too happy, if they realize that the just added capability of custom fields will not be part of the upcoming BigData update, so I am sure Workday will include these.
If Workday Update 19 passes that threshold - we will see from customer feedback in the next weeks and months. If Workday would be a traditional enterprise software vendor, I would expect most customers not taking this update and waiting out for Update 20 and 21 later this year.
If you think it through - you can even discover one of the (few) downsides of being a SaaS customer, you may not want any of the Workday Update 19 features, but still will be upgraded and may have to work through some training, maintenance and documentation needs.
The real surprise to me was, that Workday has been able to hold off on standard enterprise software customization - or even personalization options for more than 6 years, and only now introduces these capabilities gradually. It speaks for the guts of the company to even herald this as a feature, and the weakness of the competition to not take advantage of this missing capability more successfully till now.
The losers on this situation have been Workday customers, who had to wait a long time to get some standard enterprise customization features for their Workday system, and even now only with a gradual, object by object introduction. Surprisingly this has not been discussed earlier and elsewhere.
On the flipside - congrats to Workday for keeping the trust in the 4 monthly update schedule and bundling up the most you can out of a release that was understandably and as expected thinner in functionality. And it looks like the big development projects around Recruitment and BigData are on track for the respective fall and winter releases, so the future Update functionality richness should increase again.
[For the rest of this post I will only focus on the HCM side of the Update.]
So what was in Workday Update 19?
Update 19 Functionality
Here is an overview of Update 19 features, as presented on Workday's website:- Cross Application Enhancements
With this Workday refers to platform enhancements, that benefit both Financial and HCM applications. The most critical, though the least promoted from what I see, are additional 6 connectors of Workday to the rest of the world, like e.g. T&A Data, Check printing etc.
A lot of attention was spent by Workday on the capability to add custom fields and labels - see here. To my surprise this is not a system wide capability, but needs to be introduced object by object (e.g. cost center, supervisory org, region etc). I really would like to know why.
- Mobile
Like many other companies betting on HTML5 to work out for their mobile system needs, Workday has realized that the industry was too optimistic in the HTML5 capabilities (or too hopeful HTML5 would cut significant platform specific development investment). The most notable renegade to HTML5 is actually Facebook. So Workday introduced a native Android application for smartphones and extended functionality to the existing iOS platforms (enhancements to time entry, update contact information (surprised you weren't able to do this before) and job change management). Going forward customer will have to be aware of different levels of capability between the iOS, Android apps and the HTML5 support for other smartphone OS.
- HCM, Payroll Enhancements
This is a mixed bag of new reporting (Workday Trending is now GA), availability of time series data in modifiable reports, new headcount planning capability.
The SaaS release conundrum
One of they key benefits that SaaS provides, is a regular release cycle, usually multiple releases per year. Workday for instance releases every 4 months. There are a lot of benefits of the regular release cycles, as customers can adjust their implementation and go live plans, it gives a cadence to the sales, training and partner efforts and last but not least imposes discipline on the vendor's developers.When you compare it with the large internet properties though, it's significantly different, as e.g. Facebook releases Home when they are ready, it's basically release when ready vs. release on schedule.
Release on schedule has the disadvantage, that the vendor needs to release something, even when there may not be so many value creation features in the release than you would usually see. That problem gets acerbated, when vendors need to split their development teams because of development projects, that need more time than the regular release cycle and with that reduce their capacity for building features for the immediate next release.
The challenge for all SaaS vendors in a similar scenario is, that the regular releases create trust in their ability to release more functionality, and many - like Workday - have made this a key differentiator vs. the dinosaurs of the industry. But that makes them also a slave to the cadence.
Workday release richness trending down
So I did a small, quick and dirty assessment of how much Workday has packed into the last 5 updates functionality wise, with the yellow highlight marking a heavy hitter that required significant development capacity, but also provided significant new feature benefits to customers:
And - not surprisingly - the feature richness of Workday updates fizzles out a bit... as predicted in a recent post.
Financials, Recruitment and BigData weigh heavy
As mentioned above in the conundrum - keeping up with the regular release schedule is a challenge, when you need to work on other development projects, that take more than one release cycle. Always a challenge for any development organization (fork code, double error correction etc) - but Workday is undergoing three significant major investments.Workday CTO Stan Sweete confirmed again, that development resources are split 50 / 50 between HCM and Financials. On the HCM side, the new recruitment module will keep large capacities of the HCM development team busy, and while the support for the Workday BigData offering will be most likely in the foundation / platform - it will need exposure and expertise from the applications, notably HCM.
It will be also key for Workday, to add all the custom fields they can now, so they will be part of the upcoming BigData update. Customer won't be too happy, if they realize that the just added capability of custom fields will not be part of the upcoming BigData update, so I am sure Workday will include these.
Does the headline make sense now?
Very much hope so - if not, here is how it's meant: When you are bound to a regular release cycle as a SaaS vendor, you may have to endure some thinner than usual relases, as you developers are busy working on the other, longer running projects. The challenge for the vendor is to keep credibility and to have enough substance in the release to create value.If Workday Update 19 passes that threshold - we will see from customer feedback in the next weeks and months. If Workday would be a traditional enterprise software vendor, I would expect most customers not taking this update and waiting out for Update 20 and 21 later this year.
If you think it through - you can even discover one of the (few) downsides of being a SaaS customer, you may not want any of the Workday Update 19 features, but still will be upgraded and may have to work through some training, maintenance and documentation needs.
MyPOV
Workday hat a thinner than usual release with Update 19 - but that was to be expected.The real surprise to me was, that Workday has been able to hold off on standard enterprise software customization - or even personalization options for more than 6 years, and only now introduces these capabilities gradually. It speaks for the guts of the company to even herald this as a feature, and the weakness of the competition to not take advantage of this missing capability more successfully till now.
The losers on this situation have been Workday customers, who had to wait a long time to get some standard enterprise customization features for their Workday system, and even now only with a gradual, object by object introduction. Surprisingly this has not been discussed earlier and elsewhere.
On the flipside - congrats to Workday for keeping the trust in the 4 monthly update schedule and bundling up the most you can out of a release that was understandably and as expected thinner in functionality. And it looks like the big development projects around Recruitment and BigData are on track for the respective fall and winter releases, so the future Update functionality richness should increase again.