A Deeper Dive into Analytics Services in Our City Map
Analytics Services works closely with the OMS, giving them direct access to Workday business objects. When reports are run, either interactively or in the background, they run in the same OMS JVM as all online requests. Depending on the size and complexity of the report and the other processes that are running at the time, reports may potentially impact online response time. As customer size and correspondingly the amount of data that they process during reporting increases, more OMS resources become consumed for reporting.
In response, Workday has added a dedicated read-only service called the Object Reporting Service (ORS) to the architecture to offload processing of high-volume reporting. The ORS is an up-to-date shadow of the Transaction Service where updates occur. The Reporting Service is built to scale as Workday operations can scale out additional reporting servers to handle Reporting Services doing the report processing for our large-enterprise customers.
Reporting servers are tasked with processing reports run as a background process. No updates will occur on a reporting server. At the tenant level, Workday operations can specify whether background reports should be processing in the transaction processing OMS or on a separate reporting server. Based on that setting, background reports get routed for processing by the ESB accordingly. The reporting servers will be kept up-to-date with the OMS and will run with the latest data up to the moment, always keeping transactional and analytics data in sync.
Workday Prism Analytics manages users’ access to the big data store in HDFS. Users load data into the big data store using a retrieval service. This data is enhanced with data from the Transaction Service. A regular flow of data from the Transaction Service keeps the big data store up-to-date.
At Workday, we are committed to helping our customers become both transaction-ready and decision-ready. Analytics leaders are being asked to support their business’ growing need for actionable data and insights to support data-driven decision-making. Many customers tell us that they are still struggling with a variety of challenges when supporting analytics initiatives:
Analytics Services: The Light-Blue District
Workday Way
Automation Drive
Workday Way
Automation Drive
Analytics Services:
the Light-Blue District
Traditional systems suffer from a “data divide.” Transactions
are handled in one system, while analytics happen in another. This approach can result in unreliable security and stale data.
The Workday architecture is designed to close the data divide through analytics and transaction services all operating on the same real-time data with a single approach to security. Let’s explore how Workday Analytics Services support real-time
insights on both Workday and non-Workday data at scale.
A Deeper Dive into Analytics Services in Our City Map
More data being generated and captured than ever before
Patchwork architecture that limits data quality and access
Varying levels of data literacy among business users
Limited data and analytics resources and manual processes that don’t scale
Stringent requirements for data privacy and governance
UI
Integration
OMS
Analytics
Persistence
Operations
Deployment
Machine Learning
Every customer is at a different stage of their analytics journey and looking to get something unique for their business out of Workday:
A starting point of clean, accurate, and secure data
Performant analytics that are tailored to the business
The ability to integrate non-Workday data sources
A shift from IT-led to self-service analysis
A way to prioritize top opportunities and risks
We meet you where you are on this journey with analytics solutions that are available today, and we’re investing in new capabilities for you along the way. Introducing the analytics journey with Workday. The destination: better decisions.
The Analytics Journey
DELIVERED CONTENT
WORKDAY DATA FOUNDATION
EXTERNAL
DATA
SELF-SERVICE
AUGMENTED ANALYTICS
BETTER DECISIONS
Workday Data Foundation
Delivered Content
External Data
Self-Service
Augmented Analytics
It’s important to remember that the analytics journey is an ongoing one, and there is no single point of entry or completion. That’s why we say “North Star” rather than “Finish Line.”
Our North Star in analytics is to provide all Workday customers with a single technology platform to report and analyze their transactional, operational, and planning data, all within Workday. We’re uniquely equipped to do this because of our architecture that exists today and the investments that we are making for tomorrow.
This single technology platform will include:
Our North Star: A Single Analytics and Reporting Architecture
One Source for Data. Customers will be able to access all of their data within Workday, whether that’s planning data or budgets and forecasts, actual financial and worker transactions, data from non-Workday systems, public data such as census data, or peer data that you can benchmark against.
A Single Analytics Engine and Data Access Layer. One analytics engine will be able to query and transform data across all these data sources, serving up transactional, operational, and planning data to the user—all at the right time and with background synchronization.
Tailored Analytics Tools and Applications. Users will be able to generate and consume insights using their preferred tool all within Workday. With drag-and-drop data discovery, packaged analytics applications, reports, dashboards, and connectivity to productivity tools such as worksheets and livepages, plus Microsoft Excel, sensitive data is governed by a single security model and can be securely distributed to all ends of the enterprise.
Workday: Unified Analytics and Reporting Architecture
DISCOVERY BOARDS CANVAS
Financial Reporting
Plan vs. Actuals
Ad Hoc Reporting
Management Reporting
Operational Reporting
Analytics Applications
WORKSHEETS AND LIVEPAGES
OFFICECONNECT FOR MICROSOFT OFFICE
ANALYTICS ENGINE AND DATA ACCESS LAYER
Adaptive Insights Planning Data
Workday Core Transactional Data
Workday Prism Analytics Operational Data
Workday Data-as-a-Service
When we’re done, we will have achieved something nontrivial that combines plan, transactional, and operational data in a single interface so HR and finance leaders can make better decisions. It’s an ambitious vision, but we’ve already made significant progress.
Workday data foundation
Workday provides a variety of tools to ensure that customers have access to clean, accurate, and secure data. One of our best tools to ensure that your data is clean and accurate is business process validation and alerts. These alerts can range from providing a simple warning to preventing the user from ever submitting an invalid transaction. In HR, for example, this could mean validating that gender or marital status is populated as appropriate on a per-country basis to enable select individuals to backdate job requisitions. For finance, this includes making the supplier mandatory for contingent labor or ensuring that the appropriate worktags are specified for journal entries.
Clean and accurate data allows the end user to traverse multiple dimensions via the OMS, and drill directly from reports into underlying details. The single security model in Workday, which can be applied to the field, row, or cell level, ensures that users only see the data that they have permission to view. Because with Workday, analytics are tied to the transactional system of record—security settings automatically update as organizational changes occur.
Delivered content
There are three key areas of delivered content: analytics data sources, reports, and dashboards. Workday provides analytics data sources, such as trended worker, that power our delivered workforce composition dashboards and provide 36 months of snapshots for analysis on workforce trends. In addition, Workday provides indexed data sources for faster, more reliable reporting. A significant number of these data sources are extensible (trended worker, position, staffing events, and a number of key recruiting data sources), meaning customers can add their own calculated metrics or custom fields, and Workday will index those additional fields as well.
Workday Financial Management customers can extend our delivered financial statements and take advantage of delivered dashboards for expense management, procurement, supplier accounts, and more. Dashboard tabs and alerts enable customers to curate information and tailor analytics to the specific needs of their business, without sacrificing performance.
Speaking of performance, Workday has made significant investments in performance and resiliency. By increasing concurrency (threads per report run, distributed operations), improving indexing and caching, and optimizing BI runtimes, serialization, and method bindings, your analytics and reporting will continue to perform and scale as your organization grows.
Customers have seen some impressive results, including:
A 55 percent improvement in time spent in drill-downs for matrix, trending, and composite reports
And for reports that return more than 1,000 results, we’ve seen:
A 30 percent to 50 percent improvement in performance of interactive, advanced reports
Over 60 percent improvement in the performance of advanced reports for Workday Prism Analytics data sources
External data
Workday has always provided real-time reporting and analytics on Workday transactional data enabled by Analytics Services. With the launch of Workday Prism Analytics in 2017, those capabilities have expanded to enable customers to integrate high volumes of operational data, third-party application data, and historical data from legacy systems for analysis all within Workday. As the data hub for financial and HR analytics and reporting, Workday Prism Analytics is an end-to-end technology platform providing users with a single source for workforce, financial, and operational data for reporting and analysis.
Data Hub for Financial and HR Analytics
Workday Transactions
Historical Data
Third-Party GL
CRM
Service Desk
Survey
Industry Systems
Transactional
Operational
Data Acquisition Framework
Data Catalog
Data Preparation
Governance
Data Lineage
Financial Reporting and Analysis
HR Reporting and Analysis
Operational Reporting and Analysis
Planning, Budgeting, and Forecasting (Adaptive Insights)
Because Workday Prism Analytics uses a Hadoop (YARN + HDFS) ecosystem, with Spark in-memory querying and data prep engines with a Parquet columnar store format, data can be brought in and analyzed at scale.
Workday Prism Analytics addresses the following challenges faced by IT leaders:
Insight and decision support. With Workday Prism Analytics, customers can generate new insights by securely combining disparate data sources all within Workday.
Automation and efficiency. Workday Prism Analytics enables customers to extend the value that they’re already receiving from Workday to key high-volume external datasets. The result is less time manually compiling data and more time analyzing it.
System consolidation. Workday Prism Analytics enables customers to simplify their enterprise application landscape and reduce maintenance and overhead costs.
Getting non-Workday data into Workday Prism Analytics is a simple process. Customers can ingest data via SFTP connection and/or from file uploads (for example, csv). For a more programmatic solution, customers can use our API or Studio connector, and/or work with one of our Integration Platform-as-a-Service (iPaaS) partners: SnapLogic, Jitterbit, or Dell Boomi. Workday Prism Analytics also includes scheduling functionality for managing data loads. It maps external data to Workday transactional data based on selections made by the user, and loads it as a data source into the data catalog where it can be refreshed on an ad-hoc or scheduled basis.
Self-Service
Soon, all Workday customers will have access to discovery boards, an intuitive authoring experience for published reports on Workday transactional data sources. Users can leverage discovery boards for ad hoc analysis on core Workday Financial Management and/or Workday HCM transactional data sources, including data sources with data source filters and data source prompts. In sum, they will be given a better simplified reporting experience in their core Workday solutions.
As we open access to core Workday Financial Management and Workday HCM data sources, security can be applied down to the individual cell level based on the existing domains and security groups that users have already configured.
Workday Prism Analytics customers will also be able to analyze their blended Workday and non-Workday data sources in discovery boards, in addition to Workday transactional data.
Discovery Boards Canvas
Map: Single Reporting Architecture
Operational Reporting
Ad-Hoc Analysis
Financial Reporting
Management Reporting
Plan vs. Actuals
Analytic Applications
Augmented Analytics
Augmented analytics is an approach that automates insight discovery for a broad range of business users, using pattern detection to look for important changes that a human might not see, graph processing to find connections across vast datasets, machine learning to predict the most important issue for users to focus on, and natural language generation to explain what is happening in a simple story. With augmented analytics, business analysts will be able to reduce the amount of time they spend on manual data exploration and surface otherwise unattainable insights, while business managers and leaders will be able to access and act on the most relevant insights faster than ever before.
Storyteller, or the storyteller engine, is the augmented analytics engine in Workday that searches millions of data combinations, makes connections between those combinations, and surfaces the most significant results in story form.
How the Storyteller Engine Works
Pattern Detection
Graph Processing
Machine Learning
Natural Language Generation
Workday will first use augmented analytics in the standalone analytics application Workday People Analytics. The application ingests data from the OMS via Workday Prism Analytics, with each content area matched to a specific data source by its topic. For example, data for the worker-related business questions about organization composition is tied to the worker’s data source, hiring is sourced from the recruiting events data source, and so on. The report templates that define the underlying data model are delivered by Workday People Analytics, which customers can customize according to the specifications of their tenants. Each customer can also choose which topics and fields should be included in the analysis, and exclude groups of employees, such as contingent workers.
After confirming the definition of the report, the data is ingested into Workday Prism Analytics via snapshots that re-create the trending history of those data sources. The data is consequently transformed and enriched in a Workday Prism Analytics data pipeline to prepare the datasets for the storyteller analytical engine. After the final dataset is published, the storyteller engine launches, ingesting the data and a set of instructions to search for insights. When the analysis is finished, the storyteller outputs are stored in new Workday Prism Analytics data sources, which serve as a source for the Workday People Analytics UI.
The Workday People Analytics UI is using customized discovery board technology pointing to published data sources in Workday Prism Analytics. The application is combining both the storyteller inputs that provide KPI, metric, and chart content (and can be used for further
ad-hoc analysis in a generic discovery board), as well as storyteller outputs that contain insights found in the data to answer various business questions using NLG.
At Workday, we are committed to helping our customers become both transaction-ready and decision-ready. Analytics leaders are being asked to support their business’s growing need for actionable data and insights to support data-driven decision making. Many customers tell us that they are still struggling with a variety of challenges when supporting analytics initiatives:
More data being generated and captured than ever before
More data being generated and captured than ever before
Patchwork architecture that limits data quality and access
Limited data and analytics resources and manual processes that don’t scale
At Workday, we are committed to helping our customers become both transaction-ready and decision-ready. Analytics leaders are being asked to support their business’s growing need for actionable data and insights to support data-driven decision making. Many customers tell us that they are still struggling with a variety of challenges when supporting analytics initiatives:
More data being generated and captured than ever before
Patchwork architecture that limits data quality and access
Varying levels of data literacy among business users
Limited data and analytics resources and manual processes that don’t scale
Stringent requirements for data privacy and governance
Every customer is at a different stage of their analytics journey and looking to get something unique for their business out of Workday:
UI Services: Let’s Talk Mobile
Informed by our experience with mobile design and delivery and inspired by innovation from the consumer internet, we have seen that a UX gets “stale” if design is not refreshed at least every other year. We’ve also seen that UX must be “right time,” meaning situationally appropriate, and consistent across platforms, including web and mobile. Mobile access is a given in modern applications, and not a separate product or platform. With Workday, mobile access is simply another aspect of UI Services, included and supported as part of every application.
Our mobile experience is consistent with the web and responsive to the target device. Each client’s user experience is optimized based on touch and form factors, so users don’t have to pinch and zoom to find fields, cards, or buttons designed for the real estate of a desktop browser.
Because the Workday mobile solution is simply an extension of the application, mobile users access the same data, business logic, and functionality as they do on a desktop, with the same security. For example, a dashboard built on the desktop can be accessed and modified on any mobile device, with no data persistent on the device. The only setup (other than application download) is to grant all appropriate users the ability to use mobile devices to access Workday.
A starting point of clean, accurate, and secure data
Performant analytics that are tailored to the business
The ability to integrate non-Workday data sources
A shift from IT-led to self-service analysis
A way to prioritize top opportunities and risks
We meet you where you are on this journey with analytics solutions that are available today, and we’re investing in new capabilities for you along the way. Introducing the analytics journey with Workday. The destination: better decisions.
We meet you where you are on this journey with analytics solutions that are available today, and we’re investing in new capabilities for you along the way. Introducing the analytics journey with Workday. The destination: better decisions.
The Analytics Journey
Workday Data Foundation
One Source for Data. Customers will be able to access all of their data within Workday, whether that’s planning data or budgets and forecasts, actual financial and worker transactions, data from non-Workday systems, public data such as census data, or peer data that you can benchmark against.
A Single Analytics Engine and Data Access Layer. One analytics engine will be able to query and transform data across all these data sources, serving up transactional, operational, and planning data to the user—all at the right time and with background synchronization.
Our North Star: A Single Analytics and Reporting Architecture
Our North Star in analytics is to provide all Workday customers with a single technology platform to report and analyze their transactional, operational, and planning data, all within Workday. We’re uniquely equipped to do this because of our architecture that exists today and the investments that we are making for tomorrow.
This single technology platform will include:
Our North Star: A Single Analytics and Reporting Architecture
Our North Star in analytics is to provide all Workday customers with a single technology platform to report and analyze their transactional, operational, and planning data, all within Workday. We’re uniquely equipped to do this because of our architecture that exists today and the investments that we are making for tomorrow.
This single technology platform will include:
Workday data foundation
Workday provides a variety of tools to ensure that customers have access to clean, accurate and secure data. One of our best tools to ensure that your data is clean and accurate is business process validation and alerts. These alerts can range from providing a simple warning to preventing the user from ever submitting an invalid transaction. In HR, for example, this could mean validating that gender or marital status is populated as appropriate on a per country basis to enable select individuals to backdate job requisitions. For Finance, this includes making the supplier mandatory for contingent labor or ensuring that the appropriate worktags are specified for journal entries.
Clean and accurate data allows the end user to traverse multiple dimensions via the OMS, and drill directly from reports into underlying details. The single security model in Workday, which can be applied to the field, row or cell level, ensures that users only see the data that they have permission to view. Because with Workday, analytics are tied to the transactional system of record—security settings automatically update as organizational changes occur.
Workday Data Foundation
There are three key areas of delivered content: analytics data sources, reports, and dashboards. Workday provides analytics data sources, such as trended worker, that power our delivered workforce composition dashboards and provide 36 months of snapshots for analysis on workforce trends. In addition, Workday provides indexed data sources for faster, more reliable reporting. A significant number of these data sources are extensible (trended worker, position, staffing events, and a number of key recruiting data sources), meaning customers can add their own calculated metrics or custom fields, and Workday will index those additional fields as well.
Workday Financial Management customers can extend our delivered financial statements and take advantage of delivered dashboards for expense management, procurement, supplier accounts, and more. Dashboard tabs and alerts enable customers to curate information and tailor analytics to the specific needs of their business, without sacrificing performance.
Speaking of performance, Workday has made significant investments in performance and resiliency. By increasing concurrency (threads per report run, distributed operations), improving indexing and caching, and optimizing BI runtimes, serialization, and method bindings, your analytics and reporting will continue to perform and scale as your organization grows.
Customers have seen some impressive results, including:
A 55% improvement in time spent in drill-downs for matrix, trending, and composite reports
A 30% to 50% improvement in performance of interactive, advanced reports
Workday data foundation
Workday provides a variety of tools to ensure that customers have access to clean, accurate and secure data. One of our best tools to ensure that your data is clean and accurate is business process validation and alerts. These alerts can range from providing a simple warning to preventing the user from ever submitting an invalid transaction. In HR, for example, this could mean validating that gender or marital status is populated as appropriate on a per country basis to enable select individuals to backdate job requisitions. For Finance, this includes making the supplier mandatory for contingent labor or ensuring that the appropriate worktags are specified for journal entries.
Clean and accurate data allows the end user to traverse multiple dimensions via the OMS, and drill directly from reports into underlying details. The single security model in Workday, which can be applied to the field, row or cell level, ensures that users only see the data that they have permission to view. Because with Workday, analytics are tied to the transactional system of record—security settings automatically update as organizational changes occur.
External data
And for reports that return more than 1,000 results, we’ve seen:
A 30% to 50% improvement in performance of interactive, advanced reports
Insight and decision support. With Workday Prism Analytics, customers can generate new insights by securely combining disparate data sources all within Workday.
Automation and efficiency. Workday Prism Analytics enables customers to extend the value that they’re already receiving from Workday to key high volume external data sets. The result is less time manually compiling data and more time analyzing it.
Because Workday Prism Analytics uses a Hadoop (YARN + HDFS) ecosystem, with Spark in-memory querying and data prep engines with a Parquet columnar store format, data can be brought in and analyzed at scale.
Workday Prism Analytics addresses the following challenges faced by IT leaders:
External data
Workday has always provided real-time reporting and analytics on Workday transactional data enabled by Analytics Services. With the launch of Workday Prism Analytics in 2017, those capabilities have expanded to enable customers to integrate high volumes of operational data, third-party application data, and historical data from legacy systems for analysis all within Workday. As the data hub for financial and HR analytics and reporting, Workday Prism Analytics is an end-to-end technology platform providing users with a single source for workforce, financial, and operational data for reporting and analysis.
Self-Service
Soon, all Workday customers will have access to discovery boards, an intuitive authoring experience for published reports on Workday transactional data sources. Users can leverage discovery boards for ad hoc analysis on core Workday Financial Management and/or Workday HCM transactional data sources, including data sources with data source filters and data source prompts. In sum, they will be given a better simplified reporting experience in their core Workday solutions.
As we open access to core Workday Financial Management and Workday HCM data sources, security can be applied down to the individual cell level based on the existing domains and security groups that users have already configured.
Workday Prism Analytics customers will also be able to analyze their blended Workday and non-Workday data sources in discovery boards, in addition to Workday transactional data.
Discovery Boards Canvas
Augmented Analytics
Augmented analytics is an approach that automates insight discovery for a broad range of business users, using pattern detection to look for important changes that a human might not see, graph processing to find connections across vast datasets, machine learning to predict the most important issue for users to focus on, and natural language generation to explain what is happening in a simple story. With augmented analytics, business analysts will be able to reduce the amount of time they spend on manual data exploration and surface otherwise unattainable insights, while business managers and leaders will be able to access and act on the most relevant insights faster than ever before.
Storyteller, or the storyteller engine, is the augmented analytics engine in Workday that searches millions of data combinations, makes connections between those combinations, and surfaces the most significant results in story form.
UI
Integration
OMS
Persistence
Analytics
Operations
Deployment
Machine Learning
Workday will first use augmented analytics in the standalone analytics application Workday People Analytics. The application ingests data from the OMS via WorkdayPrism Analytics, with each content area matched to a specific datasource by its topic. For example, data for the worker-related business questions about organization composition is tied to the worker’s data source, hiring is sourced from the recruiting events data source, and so on. The report templates that define the underlying data model are delivered by Workday People Analytics, which customers can customize according to the specifications of their tenants. Each customer can also choose which topics and fields should be included in the analysis, and exclude groups of employees, such as contingent workers.
After confirming the definition of the report, the data is ingested into Workday Prism Analytics via snapshots that re-create the trending history of those data sources. The data is consequently transformed and enriched in a Workday Prism Analytics data pipeline to prepare the datasets for the storyteller analytical engine. After the final dataset is published, the storyteller engine launches, ingesting the data and a set of instructions to search for insights. When the analysis is finished, the storyteller outputs are stored in new Workday Prism Analytics data sources, which serve as a source for the Workday People Analytics UI.
The Workday People Analytics UI is using customized discovery board technology pointing to published data sources in Workday Prism Analytics. The application is combining both the storyteller inputs that provide KPI, metric, and chart content (and can be used for further ad hoc analysis in a generic discovery board), as well as storyteller outputs that contain insights found in the data to answer various business questions using NLG.
Analytics Services: the Light-Blue District
At Workday, we are committed to helping our customers become both transaction-ready and decision-ready. Analytics leaders are being asked to support their business’s growing need for actionable data and insights to support data-driven decision making. Many customers tell us that they are still struggling with a variety of challenges when supporting analytics initiatives:
More data being generated and captured than ever before
Patchwork architecture that limits data quality and access
Varying levels of data literacy among business users
Limited data and analytics resources and manual processes that don’t scale
Stringent requirements for data privacy and governance
Every customer is at a different stage of their analytics journey and looking to get something unique for their business out of Workday:
A starting point of clean, accurate, and secure data
Performant analytics that are tailored to the business
The ability to integrate non-Workday data sources
A shift from IT-led to self-service analysis
A way to prioritize top opportunities and risks
We meet you where you are on this journey with analytics solutions that are available today, and we’re investing in new capabilities for you along the way. Introducing the analytics journey with Workday. The destination: better decisions.
The Analytics Journey
WORKDAY DATA FOUNDATION
EXTERNAL
DATA
SELF-SERVICE
AUGMENTED ANALYTICS
DELIVERED CONTENT
BETTER DECISIONS
Workday Data Foundation
Delivered Content
External Data
Self-Service
Augmented Analytics
It’s important to remember that the analytics journey is an ongoing one, and there is no single point of entry or completion. That’s why we say “North Star” rather than “Finish Line.”
Our North Star: A Single Analytics and Reporting Architecture
Our North Star in analytics is to provide all Workday customers with a single technology platform to report and analyze their transactional, operational, and planning data, all within Workday. We’re uniquely equipped to do this because of our architecture that exists today and the investments that we are making for tomorrow.
This single technology platform will include:
One Source for Data. Customers will be able to access all of their data within Workday, whether that’s planning data or budgets and forecasts, actual financial and worker transactions, data from non-Workday systems, public data such as census data, or peer data that you can benchmark against.
A Single Analytics Engine and Data Access Layer. One analytics engine will be able to query and transform data across all these data sources, serving up transactional, operational, and planning data to the user—all at the right time and with background synchronization.
Tailored Analytics Tools and Applications. Users will be able to generate and consume insights using their preferred tool all within Workday. With drag-and-drop data discovery, packaged analytics applications, reports, dashboards, and connectivity to productivity tools such as worksheets and livepages, plus Microsoft Excel, sensitive data is governed by a single security model and can be securely distributed to all ends of the enterprise.
Workday: Unified Analytics & Reporting Architecture
OFFICECONNECT FOR MICROSOFT OFFICE
ANALYTICS ENGINE AND DATA ACCESS LAYER
DISCOVERY BOARDS CANVAS
Financial Reporting
Plan vs. Actuals
Ad Hoc Reporting
Management Reporting
Operational Reporting
Analytics Applications
WORKSHEETS AND LIVEPAGES
Adaptive Insights Planning Data
Workday Core Transactional Data
Workday Prism Analytics Operational Data
Workday Data-as-a-Service
When we’re done, we will have achieved something nontrivial that combines plan, transactional, and operational data in a single interface so HR and finance leaders can make better decisions. It’s an ambitious vision, but we’ve already made significant progress.
Workday data foundation
Workday provides a variety of tools to ensure that customers have access to clean, accurate and secure data. One of our best tools to ensure that your data is clean and accurate is business process validation and alerts. These alerts can range from providing a simple warning to preventing the user from ever submitting an invalid transaction. In HR, for example, this could mean validating that gender or marital status is populated as appropriate on a per country basis to enable select individuals to backdate job requisitions. For Finance, this includes making the supplier mandatory for contingent labor or ensuring that the appropriate worktags are specified for journal entries.
Clean and accurate data allows the end user to traverse multiple dimensions via the OMS, and drill directly from reports into underlying details. The single security model in Workday, which can be applied to the field, row or cell level, ensures that users only see the data that they have permission to view. Because with Workday, analytics are tied to the transactional system of record—security settings automatically update as organizational changes occur.
Delivered content
There are three key areas of delivered content: analytics data sources, reports, and dashboards. Workday provides analytics data sources, such as trended worker, that power our delivered workforce composition dashboards and provide 36 months of snapshots for analysis on workforce trends. In addition, Workday provides indexed data sources for faster, more reliable reporting. A significant number of these data sources are extensible (trended worker, position, staffing events, and a number of key recruiting data sources), meaning customers can add their own calculated metrics or custom fields, and Workday will index those additional fields as well.
Workday Financial Management customers can extend our delivered financial statements and take advantage of delivered dashboards for expense management, procurement, supplier accounts, and more. Dashboard tabs and alerts enable customers to curate information and tailor analytics to the specific needs of their business, without sacrificing performance.
Speaking of performance, Workday has made significant investments in performance and resiliency. By increasing concurrency (threads per report run, distributed operations), improving indexing and caching, and optimizing BI runtimes, serialization, and method bindings, your analytics and reporting will continue to perform and scale as your organization grows.
Customers have seen some impressive results, including:
A 55% improvement in time spent in drill-downs for matrix, trending, and composite reports
And for reports that return more than 1,000 results, we’ve seen:
A 30% to 50% improvement in performance of interactive, advanced reports
Over 60% improvement in the performance of advanced reports for Workday Prism Analytics data sources
External data
Workday has always provided real-time reporting and analytics on Workday transactional data enabled by Analytics Services. With the launch of Workday Prism Analytics in 2017, those capabilities have expanded to enable customers to integrate high volumes of operational data, third-party application data, and historical data from legacy systems for analysis all within Workday. As the data hub for financial and HR analytics and reporting, Workday Prism Analytics is an end-to-end technology platform providing users with a single source for workforce, financial, and operational data for reporting and analysis.
Data Hub for Financial and HR Analytics
Workday Transactions
Historical Data
Third Party GL
CRM
Service Desk
Survey
Industry Systems
Transactional
Operational
Data Acquisition Framework
Data Catalog
Data Preparation
Governance
Data Lineage
Financial Reporting and Analysis
HR Reporting and Analysis
Operational Reporting and Analysis
Planning, Budgeting, and Forecasting (Adaptive Insights)
Because Workday Prism Analytics uses a Hadoop (YARN + HDFS) ecosystem, with Spark in-memory querying and data prep engines with a Parquet columnar store format, data can be brought in and analyzed at scale.
Workday Prism Analytics addresses the following challenges faced by IT leaders:
Insight and decision support. With Workday Prism Analytics, customers can generate new insights by securely combining disparate data sources all within Workday.
Automation and efficiency. Workday Prism Analytics enables customers to extend the value that they’re already receiving from Workday to key high volume external data sets. The result is less time manually compiling data and more time analyzing it.
System consolidation. Workday Prism Analytics enables customers to simplify their enterprise application landscape and reduce maintenance and overhead costs.
Getting non-Workday data into Workday Prism Analytics is a simple process. Customers can ingest data via SFTP connection and/or from file uploads (for example, csv). For a more programmatic solution, customers can use our API or Studio connector, and/or work with one of our Integration Platform-as-a-Service (iPaaS) partners: SnapLogic, Jitterbit, orDell Boomi. Workday Prism Analytics also includes scheduling functionality for managing data loads. It maps external data to Workday transactional data based on selections made by the user, and loads it as a data source into the data catalog where it can be refreshed on an ad hoc or scheduled basis.
Self-Service
Soon, all Workday customers will have access to discovery boards, an intuitive authoring experience for published reports on Workday transactional data sources. Users can leverage discovery boards for ad hoc analysis on core Workday Financial Management and/or Workday HCM transactional data sources, including data sources with data source filters and data source prompts. In sum, they will be given a better simplified reporting experience in their core Workday solutions.
As we open access to core Workday Financial Management and Workday HCM data sources, security can be applied down to the individual cell level based on the existing domains and security groups that users have already configured.
Workday Prism Analytics customers will also be able to analyze their blended Workday and non-Workday data sources in discovery boards, in addition to Workday transactional data.
Discovery Boards Canvas
Map: Single Reporting Architecture
Ad-Hoc Analysis
Financial Reporting
Management Reporting
Plan vs. Actuals
Analytic Applications
Operational Reporting
Augmented Analytics
Augmented analytics is an approach that automates insight discovery for a broad range of business users, using pattern detection to look for important changes that a human might not see, graph processing to find connections across vast datasets, machine learning to predict the most important issue for users to focus on, and natural language generation to explain what is happening in a simple story. With augmented analytics, business analysts will be able to reduce the amount of time they spend on manual data exploration and surface otherwise unattainable insights, while business managers and leaders will be able to access and act on the most relevant insights faster than ever before.
Storyteller, or the storyteller engine, is the augmented analytics engine in Workday that searches millions of data combinations, makes connections between those combinations, and surfaces the most significant results in story form.
How the Storyteller Engine Works
Pattern Detection
Graph Processing
Machine Learning
Natural Language Generation
Workday will first use augmented analytics in the standalone analytics application Workday People Analytics. The application ingests data from the OMS via WorkdayPrism Analytics, with each content area matched to a specific datasource by its topic. For example, data for the worker-related business questions about organization composition is tied to the worker’s data source, hiring is sourced from the recruiting events data source, and so on. The report templates that define the underlying data model are delivered by Workday People Analytics, which customers can customize according to the specifications of their tenants. Each customer can also choose which topics and fields should be included in the analysis, and exclude groups of employees, such as contingent workers.
After confirming the definition of the report, the data is ingested into Workday Prism Analytics via snapshots that re-create the trending history of those data sources. The data is consequently transformed and enriched in a Workday Prism Analytics data pipeline to prepare the datasets for the storyteller analytical engine. After the final dataset is published, the storyteller engine launches, ingesting the data and a set of instructions to search for insights. When the analysis is finished, the storyteller outputs are stored in new Workday Prism Analytics data sources, which serve as a source for the Workday People Analytics UI.
The Workday People Analytics UI is using customized discovery board technology pointing to published data sources in Workday Prism Analytics. The application is combining both the storyteller inputs that provide KPI, metric, and chart content (and can be used for further ad hoc analysis in a generic discovery board), as well as storyteller outputs that contain insights found in the data to answer various business questions using NLG.
UI
Integration
OMS
Persistence
Analytics
Operations
Deployment
Machine Learning
Workday Way
Automation Drive
A Deeper Dive into Analytics Services in Our City Map
Analytics Services works closely with the OMS, giving them direct access to Workday business objects. When reports are run, either interactively or in the background, they run in the same OMS JVM as all online requests. Depending on the size and complexity of the report and the other processes that are running at the time, reports may potentially impact online response time. As customer size and correspondingly the amount of data that they process during reporting increases, more OMS resources become consumed for reporting.
In response, Workday has added a dedicated read-only service called the Object Reporting Service (ORS) to the architecture to offload processing of high-volume reporting. The ORS is an up-to-date shadow of the Transaction Service where updates occur. The Reporting Service is built to scale as Workday operations can scale out additional reporting servers to handle Reporting Services doing the report processing for our large-enterprise customers.
Reporting servers are tasked with processing reports run as a background process. No updates will occur on a reporting server. At the tenant level, Workday operations can specify whether background reports should be processing in the transaction processing OMS or on a separate reporting server. Based on that setting, background reports get routed for processing by the ESB accordingly. The reporting servers will be kept up-to-date with the OMS and will run with the latest data up to the moment, always keeping transactional and analytics data in sync.
Workday Prism Analytics manages users’ access to the big data store in HDFS. Users load data into the big data store using a retrieval service. This data is enhanced with data from the Transaction Service. A regular flow of data from the Transaction Service keeps the big data store up-to-date.