A guest post

It's been a while since I've written anything. I have requests from companies who wish to pay me to put content on this site but I will always keep this site as an honest blog. Just my thoughts, opinions and perspective on Workday as someone who is learning things as I go. I always welcome the thoughts, opinions and perspectives of others and I am especially pleased that a guest writer has sent me the following post.

A guest writes...

I’ve been reading this blog since it started. It’s really interesting (and remarkably rare) to see a “warts and all” unbiased account of what it’s like being a Workday customer.

I feel a bit sorry for local UK (or anywhere else) providers - they can deliver peerless products for UK users, but they’ll be ignored by any company that wants a “global” solution. Anecdotally it seems that quite a lot of Workday’s UK business comes, as PeopleSoft’s did, from US multinational organisations who buy primarily in the US and then decide they can use the same solution elsewhere.

I can also see both sides of the “global” argument - Workday has delivered a lot more global (non US) functionality over the years (and with a considerable investment in Dublin recently this is set to continue apace). On the other hand, my reaction when I read the early blog postings and other musings online was “more fool the buyers”. In other words, don’t buy a product and then complain it doesn’t have a certain piece of local market functionality.

If UK (or elsewhere) customers rejected Workday because there wasn’t enough local market content, they (Workday) would have to act.

Businesses are assumed (certainly within UK law as I understand it) to be more “savvy” about the business contracts they sign than ordinary personal consumers - and are therefore expected to do their homework about products and services they buy, so I don’t have a lot of time for them complaining later that something doesn't do what they want - unless they were misled (and I don’t believe Workday does that).

It seems to me buyers balanced missing local content against a global single system (I heard one HR Director say so directly once at HT Tech in Amsterdam).

Personally, I rue the loss of some local colour (note the spelling) in the UK due to “American Cultural Imperialism” - but the blame for this lies in two places - and a considerable amount of it has to go to people in the UK just adopting a lot of idioms, spellings, business pricatises and cliches from the USA without question.

Guest Writer 1 and I welcome your thoughts about this post. If you'd like to see more posts from Guest Writer 1 and others, please leave a comment so that we know. Or if you'd like to write something for this blog, please send it over to: helloworkday@gmail.com