Workday Rising 2017 in Chicago: My take on October 11th and 12th

Workday Rising in Chicago has finished a few days ago. I wanted to wrap up my experience at this event before it becomes ancient history. In my last post, I've reviewed my experience during the first full day at Rising, let me now cover the remaining two days.

Wednesday 11th October started with the Innovation Keynote, delivered by Mike McNamara from Flex. I found this keynote very inspiring. Among the points that made a bigger impact on me was the following:

The key concept behind this idea is that more than technology or any other asset, the best way to secure the future of an organization is to build a great culture, which is the best catalyst for transformation.

After the keynote, I attended several other sessions, which I summarize in the items below:

• Prism Analytics is very promising. It extends the reach of the great Workday reporting tools to external data, but it is not only that. It is also a huge step forward for the analysis of large volumes of data, as it uses Prism in-memory query engine. Also, the data can be acquired from both external sources and Workday itself, enabling the use of references to other Workday objects to facilitate drill down to the detail. Finally, in Workday 30, a new Data Discovery task is expected to provide ad-hoc data analysis through a very user-friendly interface, enabling all relevant end users to explore the data by themselves without the assistance of IT. However, keep in mind that Prism is being deployed gradually and for the moment is only available for some North American customers.

• At the Tips and Tricks Theater, I attended two sessions that were very interesting to me as they were focused on Financials and Planning reporting, which I had the opportunity to implement at BNB. The first one was focused on Planning reporting, which was greatly enhanced by some of the new features delivered in Workday 29. The second one covered the new Executive Financial Scorecard, also delivered in Workday 29. Both sessions were very interesting and helped me on doing a deeper analysis of how we could take advantage of them at BNB.
• My favourite one: Introduction to Workday Cloud Platform. This is the newly announced Platform-as-a-Service offering from Workday, which will enable customers to extend their use of the Workday application. In this session, several use cases were covered, which also give an idea of what we will be able to do using WCP:

• Create a new task (i.e.: Create Business Cards).
• Create a page that displays information from Workday and external sources (i.e.: show Google Drive contents).
• Trigger calculations or integrations using web hooks (i.e.: sending a Slack message).
• Invoking Workday Mobile App push notifications (i.e.: request your workers ad-hoc information through the mobile app).
• Define new business processes from scratch.

• All this keeping one of Workday's most valuable assets: The Power of One. This is because all the applications built using the WCP will be update safe, pretty much in the same way integrations are today, through versioning of the APIs.

• The last session was a very inspiring one about the Future of Enterprise Software. It was a very engaging session and plenty of interesting views of what the future may bring to Enterprise Software, with the key points around Artificial Intelligence, Augmented Reality and Platforms.

At the end of the day, it was time for the Appreciation Party, starred by Gwen Stefani and packed with lots of food, drink and entertainment.

Finally, on the last day, I still wanted to take advantage of some of the sessions. The day was quieter that the previous ones as some people was already heading back to their home locations, but it was still packed with content:

• I learned a lot about the new Plan Template features of Planning in Workday 29. This feature enables an easier decentralization of the planning process by allowing to define worksheets with protected areas and reports, which can significantly simplify its understanding by users.

• Then I had the opportunity to learn more about the internal Workday architecture, how it evolved and even changes that are currently being implemented in the road to zero downtime. It is not easy to find this information around, and although it is purely informative, I must say that it is an impressive job done by the Workday team. Comparing Workday's architecture to the one used by legacy ERPs is like comparing a rocket with a kart. Just amazing!

• Finally, I attended a session on User Experience enhancements for Workday Financial Management, although most of the topics were also valid for the entire Workday platform. Another good session, because it did not only focus on the new features delivered in Workday 29 which I knew quite well, but also covered plans for enhancements. My preferred two: improved grid performance and additional cards in the home page.

Workday Rising came to an end with a great closing keynote delivered by Shawn Achor on the importance of happiness and being positive to improve results in every area. You may view a TED talk on a similar topic that Shawn delivered some years ago.

And with that, I just hope you have found these articles useful. I hope many of you can make it to Workday Rising Europe in Barcelona between November 14th and 16th 2017. As in last year edition, BNB is a proud sponsor, so do not forget to come and see us at our booth. I will also be co-speaker of one of the sessions, so I hope to see you there too.

PS: Workday has posted a highlights video with a quite comprehensive summary of the key points covered in the event. In case you did not check it before, I would recommend you do.