Organization elements in Workday

A while back, there was a question from Pete in the comments of this post:

Hello, Can you say more about the following? 
"The Workday org structure is very different from the PeopleSoft department tree. Org elements are independent fields, rather than a top down data structure."

You say in a separate post that WD's Org Chart supports hierarchical relationships between orgs of the same type.

The organization structure is probably one of the finer points of Workday when compared to PeopleSoft.  Having seen a few different dept trees at various companies, most of us end up putting lots of detail into the dept tree for various purposes, such as security. 

In looking at our company, in PSoft we have 4 business groups.  They have a regional split, Europe/US/Asia/etc.  So we have 4 groups x 4 regions = 16 department trees.  Then, we have business units as our next level down, then sub-region, then country, then location.  As you can imagine, that's a lot of maintenance of the dept tbl and trees.

In WD, we're going through a transformation, but even if we were not, we still wouldn't end up with such a mess of data like the above.

In WD, we have the Supervisory orgs, so you still get your hierarcical relationships.  Local IT helpdesk orgs report into a helpdesk mgt org which reports into an IT support org, etc.  However, this is the extent of the hierarchy.

In our old world, we'd end up setting up depts by location, and putting them under the region, etc.  HR in region is segregated, so they'd get certain branches of the tree.  It was very hierarchical.  In some cases, when we had HR people who shouldn't see other HR people, we ended up with two HR depts, who were really one dept, except we had to break it into two due to security requirements.

In our new world, we can have just one dept, and people in whatever location we want.  We put the location on the employee, it doesn't have to be rolled into the supervisory org.  This, is where I was going with the statement of a lack of hierarchy.  (However, you can keep your strict hierarcy if you want, and mirror the PSoft tree.  You would just set up your orgs in the same parent/child relationship as the dept tree.)

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Regarding the org chart--you have various options in the 'types' of org charts available.  You can have a Supervisory org one (so like the dept tbl structure in psoft), it's your WD orgs.  OR you can use the 'location' org chart--so you can search for a location and move about the org chart.  If you choose location X, you get the emps in location X, regardless of their supervisory org, manager, etc.  There are various types of org charts pre-built into WD--you decide whether or not to use them, and which fields to display, if so.  There's a payroll group org chart, for example--we're not configuring it, but perhaps useful for payroll folks, not sure.

These org charts all run off of the various data element, so provide a different view of the data, outside the traditional org chart hierarchy.

Hope that clarifies a bit where I was trying to go with the above statements.  :)