Workday, Inc. (NYSE: WDAY), a leader in enterprise cloud applications for finance and human resources, today unveiled Workday Insight Applications, a new suite of applications that will harness the power of advanced data science and machine learning algorithms to equip customers to make smarter financial and workforce decisions. Each Workday Insight Application will address a specific business scenario by providing insights, surfacing predictions, and recommending actions that a decision-maker can take – all in an intuitive, mobile environment that is seamlessly unified with the entire Workday system.
Announced at Workday Rising 2014, the new suite of applications is a focal point of the company’s greater plan to deliver smarter technology and specific applications that further the value customers can gain with one system in the cloud. To achieve this, Workday introduced SYMAN, an intelligent information engine that weaves a predictive engine, a recommendation engine, matching algorithms, and search relevancy throughout the Workday foundation. As a result, customers will see smarter features and functionality across the Workday platform as well as within specific Workday Insight Applications.
Introducing Workday Insight Applications
With built-in reporting and analytics, Workday has historically equipped customers with real-time visibility into past and current business activity in order to make informed decisions about the people and financials in their organisations. As customer needs for more advanced analytics have increased, Workday has enhanced these insights with features including improved data visualisation and the ability to pull in external data sources using Workday Big Data Analytics. Now, Workday is taking the next step forward in analytics with Workday Insight Applications, a new suite of applications that will help users predict future business events with recommendations a decision-maker can take in order to capitalise on business opportunities or minimise risks.
Designed in partnership with customers, Workday Insight Applications will deliver:
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Smart Recommendations to Address Specific Business Scenarios
Workday Insight Applications will take the historical data in Workday, combine it with pre-configured sources of non-Workday data, and then will apply data science and machine learning algorithms in order to produce predictive insights and recommendations for specific business scenarios. With these recommendations, customers can expect to more accurately address a range of business questions and challenges such as selecting an internal career path for a top performer at risk of leaving or proactively identifying travel and entertainment expense policy abuse.
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One Complete System to Take Action
Workday Insight Applications will be completely unified with Workday Financial Management and Workday Human Capital Management, enabling decision-makers to quickly take action on recommendations and see the impact of their decision – all in one complete system that does not require separate data warehousing, data cleansing, or business intelligence tools. Additionally, with Workday’s built-in mobile functionality, they will have the option to receive notifications and take action on new recommendations in real-time, on any device.
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Adaptive Applications that Get Smarter Over Time
Workday Insight Applications will also learn from new actions taken and new data introduced for each business scenario. As a result, the relevancy and accuracy of predictions and recommendations delivered over time will improve to account for new patterns and behaviours in the context of each user, the individual’s role in the organisation, and the decision he or she is making.
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SYMAN – An Intelligent Information Engine
SYMAN takes advantage of the latest methodologies in data science and machine learning algorithms to automatically map, classify, and normalize similar definitions across multiple sources and structures of data. With SYMAN, customers will benefit from faster, more accurate information exploration and analysis built-in to each Workday Insight Application, eliminating unnecessary cost, time, and complexity required with traditional data management tools.
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Industry Trees – Pre-Configured Job Classification Taxonomies
Through SYMAN, Workday offers industry trees, which are taxonomies organising hundreds of job positions and job categories for more than 20 industries representative of its customer base – including consumer packaged goods, education, financial services, government, healthcare, and software and internet services. As an example, a recruiter in healthcare has to account for hundreds of different descriptions that potential candidates could use to self-identify as a registered nurse. For instance, an internal contractor might use “RN” on his Workday profile, while an external candidate might use “staff nurse” when submitting a resume. SYMAN is able to automatically classify and normalize all of these descriptions into one common definition of registered nurse. Additionally, SYMAN understands and processes new descriptions introduced over time, automatically mapping them back to the original registered nurse definition without any additional work from the customer.
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Universal Data – Pre-Configured Public Content
Workday Insight Applications will also provide access to a range of public data sets that will be pre-configured for customers to easily apply to business scenarios. For example, to enhance insights into high-performers who are potential flight risks, customers could take advantage of aggregated sources of public job postings that utilise the functionality of industry trees to understand job positions that are in high demand.
Availability
Workday is scheduled to make select Workday Insight Applications generally available to customers in calendar year 2015.
Comments on the News
“To make the decisions that matter most to their businesses, our customers want an experience similar to consumer applications that understand user activity over time to deliver more relevant, personalised recommendations on what book to buy, what movie to watch, or what route to take,” said Aneel Bhusri, co-founder and CEO, Workday. “With Workday Insight Applications, we’re placing that level of simplicity, accuracy, and value in the hands of our customers.”
“Data science and machine learning are driving a new breed of enterprise applications that will drastically improve decision-making across the organisation,” said R "Ray" Wang, founder and chairman, Constellation Research, Inc. “The goal is to optimise business outcomes by finding patterns of insight in data. This ultimately should inform predictions and recommendations that decision-makers can act on within an application.”
Additional Information
Please visit the Workday blog for additional perspective about Workday Insight Applications as well as other news announced from Workday Rising 2014:
- 5 Questions on Workday Insight Applications, a Q&A with Dan Beck, vice president of technology products, Workday, and Adeyemi ‘Ade’ Ajao, vice president of technology strategy, Workday
- 3 Things to Expect from Workday’s New Mobile Experience from Joe Korngiebel, vice president of user experience, Workday