Corporate Conversations: Joe Wilson from Workday [video]

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Joe Wilson, Chief Technology Officer for Workday, an EDUCAUSE Platinum Partner, offers his perspective on the challenges facing higher ed IT today.

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Joe Wilson
Chief Technology Officer
Workday

Q: What do you consider the biggest challenges in higher education right now, and how can technology leaders address those challenges?

Joe Wilson: A lot of organizations that are fully remote at this point. And so how do you continue the operations, in terms of the day to day, when you no longer have the access to proximity that you once had? And we need to think about that. So in this case for example, since March of 2020, we've been dealing with this pandemic, and that's a health-based disruption. But there could be a geographic or a nature kind of disruptions that'll happen, whether it's earthquake or God forbid, a hurricane, et cetera. But there's other things out there that we always should be thinking about. So maybe parlaying some of that business continuity planning that we do, kind of institutionally, and up-leveling that around our technology as well, so that we can serve the organizations that we need to basically provide services to, without any disruption. And the way that we're doing that for our customers today, is enabling them to continue all of their functions that they would do organizationally, with one magic thing, it's called the internet. And if you've got access to a secure internet connection, you've got access to the whole of Workday. Everything from the finance side, to the people side, to the student side, it's all there. And that's a pretty big deal. I would offer up the second area that people are really thinking about now is, visibility. That's one of the big business things that people are trying to solve for. Visibility into maybe for example, campus operations. So, what does it look like from an enrollment perspective? What does it look like from a changing demographic perspective? Am I going to have as many students on campus? Do I need to prepare, for example, food services? What are those operational drivers that I have to really keep top of mind? In terms of being able to meet their requirements, day to day. If you've got, for example, a way to continue the operations and you have visibility, then you also might want to consider, what am I going to do to be able to react or adapt, based on those things that I'm discovering through data? So for example, maybe one of the things is switching your grading schemes, or changing the enrollments, or maybe change even classes, the start and end times. Those are all very important things that you might have to do on the fly. In fact I would wager, that many of you had to do them in the Spring Semester of 2020. So that agility, being able to pivot very quickly and react, based on not only the things that you're seeing, but also the things that you're inferring from the data that you have could be very, very important, in the terms of being able to react and stay relevant. And then finally, there's this magic pricing or tuition pricing dilemma that I think a lot of folks are facing. How's that working with reimbursements? What's it look like, for example, like funding sources? Maybe even just from the paradigm of online versus in school. Is there a chasm that we have to cross in terms of pricing parity? Those are all things that people have to think about. But I would also offer up finally too that know who your student is, know who your customer is. The students are customers in a way, because they actually are applying and they want to be there, but understanding where they're coming from. Your student is not the baby boomer, it's not the Gen X, it's not the millennial, it's probably the sub-millennial, that Generation Z. And what's interesting is, we've always thought about this concept of a digital native. Well, they're already at your institutions. So then what? That sub-millennial demands, not just expects, demands a consumer-grade experience in all facets of their lives. So if you're not thinking about how to make that connection and retain that customer in terms of a student, I would caution anybody to redouble or rethink. Because more often than not, the cart is abandoned when the experience isn't great. And maybe the students might seek another alternative if they're not getting that consumer-grade experience in their institution of higher learning.

Q: How is Workday assisting higher ed IT to take on the challenges of operating during the pandemic?

Joe Wilson: So, I'd offer up that Workday as specifically helping information technology, within the domain of higher education, in a somewhat subtle but very relevant way. And I think it boils down to changing the paradigm. So for example, I like to always offer up that good architecture is a journey, not a destination. And many within information technology will probably understand that, because a lot of the platforms that we use are destinations. And because they are a destination, you have to then replatform, over time, to take advantage of different capabilities or do a full reconstruct of what you're doing, in terms of your back office. I don't think that's very smart now in 2020. And most of the applications that we've been using for a number of years now, especially on the consumer side, think about Google, I'm not sure I've ever had to replatform as a customer of that organization. But I think aspiring to do something similar is probably what we bring to bring to bear, in terms of how we assist IT within our organizations that we serve. A lot of that, stems from the fact that we made a very conscious decision early on to be both Cloud-first and Cloud-only. That was a pretty wild bet in 2005. Nobody else was really doing it in the space of money or people. And I think that bet somewhat paid off because now, I can't find a vendor in the space today who isn't claiming Cloud. Except, I think the architecture matters, in terms of how you serve or deliver in that specific medium around elasticity, around scalability, around privacy, around security. So when I think about that last part, security, it's more than just feeling good about it, it's about having that evidence around it. And clearly, Workday does not just serve higher ed, We serve organizations of all size and scales, some of those highly regulated and risk-averse in industry around the world. And so institutions of higher learning come to Workday, they join effectively, this magic math number that clearly doesn't make sense in the academic sense, but it actually is true where one plus one equals 4,000 and growing. And what I mean by that is with security perspective, think about your security teams at your respective institution, joining the security teams of Workday, and also at the same time, joining the security teams of every organization that we serve across the world. That's the magic that comes from having a single code line or a multi-tenant infrastructure, because it really is safer together. And as a result, we get some benefits in agility, in durability, in effectiveness, in efficiency, in how we serve. Because again, if we can serve the behemoths in industry, and here's a fun fact, our largest customer today has 1.7 million employees in a single instance of our service. If I can meet that level of scale, in terms of Workday, everything else just becomes infinitely easier. And I think that's how we're coalescing around the problem of what people have spoken to over a long time around this interruption that comes from having to replatform. But going beyond that, I think there's also an additional benefit, in terms of this notion of community that we bring to bear. Because I mentioned a single code line, that means all of our customers across the globe have the opportunity to speak to each other in the same language. There's no caveating, there's no inspection upon meeting somebody. You literally can have a conversation. And so that accelerates the ability to adapt, especially when it matters most. So maybe, how do you change the grading base for a course midstream? How do you do financial refunds? How do you do turn-based adjustments? How do you do makeshifts in course delivery modes? All of these things, being able to actually be sourced from a community. And what I mean by that, is not just a conversation, I'm talking about solutions where people can actually provide the inputs that you can then input into your own instance of Workday, to quickly make that pivot and quickly answer the needs in a world that demands agility.