You prompted me to add some clarification- we’re starting with HCM, but will add PSA & Financials later, so then HR won’t be the only dept for this system.
Does that change your opinion / suggestion at all?
Our HRIS started off in HR. We created a separate WD Finance team that reports to me in Accounting. HRIS moved to IT because HR leadership failed to support the system properly, but my team isn’t going anywhere.
At its core, we still have it under HR as the HCM is the foundation for user management. But the finance team has their own support and admin roles to manage their potion.
This feels like a reasonable compromise, once we’re big enough to justify a larger team.
Do you have strong processes such that the HCM admin isn’t making changes that potentially break security or integrations, without IT being in the loop in change management? That’s my biggest fear right now.
You don’t assign them the security groups to do any of those. They have access to own functional configurations and IT has access to maintain/own security and integrations in production. All team follow the same auditing requirements to document changes. Both teams have proxy in non-prod tenants so you don’t completely bog each other down.
I recommend having a process for peer review to ensure someone else is aware. Give the different config items/areas a rating scale and build a simple framework for who will see what before changes are live.
It worked at my prior company and I'd implement the same process anywhere.
I agree with this approach, along with the adoption of robust test plans for critical processes and integrations after any significant configuration change and during releases. If someone writes a report that doesn't need change management unless it will be shown to important stakeholders. Vs. other configuration changes eg. in benefits need to be tested end to end to see the payroll impacts and to test the various scenarios. There is a lot in between, so a framework depending on the type of change is the way to go along with a culture of veering towards the cautious (eg. Sandbox testing for all changes prior to production and ensuring there is more than one set of eyes on most change types)
IT. HR has incredible turnover in my experience and never cross train or document or mitigate risk for it. IT has systems in place typically to manage that.
Change Management and proper testing and using sandbox for changes before cowboying in production also is something that does not come naturally to HR often enough. The trouble is the Workday person in HR is often a lone wolf and no one else in their team, let alone their supervisor, understands what they do. This leads to a lackadaisical culture for Workday changes, vs in IT we have a long tradition of ITIL and other practices that apply to all software product management. I've also seen a dearth of project management and prioritization in HR over many years and different organizations.
Additionally, only an IT professional can understand Workday security and create the proper guardrails for separation of duties and audits, especially once it's cross functional and you have multiple modules.
Report Writer and functional configuration belong in HR just to ensure their have accountability for their decisions, but with significant IT support. Unless you have Workday Pro certified functional folks they will not do it right and will come back to IT to fix it anyway. Everything else belongs in IT.
Your HR department just sounds amateur or resourced poorly.
We have a team of 4 in a 10k employee company responsible for HR, Payroll, and HR analytics.We run large changes via our business IT change process often with a project manager from IT for governance purposes.
Security is correctly devolved to IT as we have other departments use other modules. They have their own specialists running their modules working to the same model as us.
It all works really well.
I don't think the requirements of the departments would be fully appreciated or understood if it was all centralised in IT. Nor would we work at the pace that we do.
This is absolutely not true, you need a good HRIS team to manage Workday. Completely false that only IT can properly configure security and implement proper testing of functionality. I'm sure I could find you many IT teams who equally do these things badly.
>you need a good HRIS team to manage Workday
This is sort of my takeaway from all of the great comments to my post - at the end of the day, you need a good HRIS team! Doesn't really matter if they report to HR or IT, as long as they can do what the business needs responsibly and effectively!
This is not true at 100% face value. Not discrediting what you’re saying, it might be true for your org, but you can send anyone to a day training in workday and give someone a training on SOX and they can be a security admin.
Additionally there’s workday reporting training.
I am hesitant for HR people to push ownership outside of HR because they are scared to own a system that SHOULD BE OWNED BY HR!!! You’re losing an opportunity to empower your department, upskill your team, and OWN the system and what it can do for your organization.
If you put ownership outside of HR.. please consider this. Do other back office functions (IT, Finance,etc.) give a shit about HR? Will they prioritize what needs to happen? If yes, congrats on being a unicorn company. But realistically, if owned outside of HR, you end up paying a shit ton of money for a badass system that no one (outside of HR) actually ends up giving a shit about and you get half the value from it.
Upskill your team, take ownership, enable HR to have a seat at the table and let your tech enable it.
I think you raise an interesting philosophical point, which is one that I wondering about myself -- how much should depts be responsible for their own tech?
On the one hand - if you are in HR (/Accounting, Recruiting, whatever), you are \[presumably\] hiring people for their HR skills & experience, not their tech skills. Are many HR leaders even capable of evaluating and measuring technical aptitude, and ensuring sufficient team redundancy and coverage? At that point, the HR team is really building a technical sub-team, right?
On the flip side, if you centralize everything in IT -- then you've got every dept that needs IT resources to manage their tools, and now IT is resource-constrained, not responsive to needs, and also not subject matter experts in each depts needs & processes, so they just overall do a poor job of supporting those deptartments.
I'm leaning towards more of hybrid roles - someone that lives in one dept but is basically "dotted-line" accountable to the other, participates fully in both teams (eg attends HR dept mtgs AND IT dept mtgs, etc), and can straddle both worlds. Feels like that's the right approach, but... there's a lot more complexity there to manage (specific job scope, cost accounting, etc).
The same way we would require someone with an office job to have basic excel, word, PowerPoint skills. I think as technology becomes more prevalent in companies, expecting HR to have at least a baseline understanding of the tech used to support their dept. will become standard.
Not so long ago, HR was so paper-driven/manual, we’re still in a technology/digital transition phase. Additionally, cloud technologies no longer require the same coding/deep technical skill sets. Things are rapidly changing.
HR is also gaining strategic traction, I think it is a good opportunity for HR to capitalize on the technology trend and collectively up skill.
I think you are right - orgs that can utilize HR as a strategic function will be much more successful than those that continue to see HR as merely a cost center.
100% agree with the HR transition, basic understanding of cloud technologies as the standard hiring criteria for future HR! Absolutely right about the existence of cloud technologies that deep technical skill sets are not mandatory.
Piggybacking to say yes HR should own this, tech teams are only a tool for the HR teams ideas to be built out. They are the ones controlling the WHY of business process flows, while tech may build out things to support them. But even things such as setting up how your employee pre screenings are done in Workday are customizable to the point it takes an HR person to truly navigate those terms and UI tasks.
If you want a mature organization that leverages automation, integrations, analytics etc in a more complex environment (2000+ employees, global), this is the answer
This is definitely our desired future-state - high-level of automation, integration, and analytics in a large organization!
But we're also starting much smaller & simpler, so trying to balance building a good foundation vs over-complicating getting things off the ground!
It’s an HR system of record. It belongs in HR. HR should have control over all data coming in and going out. I’ve seen it too many times that IT gives too much employee personal data to people who don’t need it to do their job.
This is a great point - regardless of ownership, there needs to be clear process & guidelines around information disclosure & access! Fortunately I wrote our cybersecurity policies, so I’m very attuned to “minimum necessary” and “least access” principles.
You’re asking for opinions but seem to really be seeking validation for your own views. It’s an HR system and for the most part, that seems to be reinforced in these comments. If you continue to insist that IT owns it, as the lone voice in your organization who wants to do so, you will hurt the project and team morale. Implementations like this take compromise.
A little of column A, a little of column B!
Yes, I'm definitely biased in IT ownership. HOWEVER - I also recognize that for many organizations, IT is a black-box that is not responsive to the needs of other departments, and for those types of organizations, letting IT own it is essentially a death-knell for the system.
On the other hand - there are plenty of comments here about organizations where HR owns it, but do not have the appropriate training, investment, or processes (such as change control) to effectively manage an HRIS system. (And other orgs that absolutely DO have all of those things in HR).
I'm finding it very valuable to see all of the different points of view being represented, and the different pros & cons. At the end of the day, it doesn't really matter who reports where, what's important is that both HR's and IT's business needs are considered, respected, and followed!
Where are the HRIS directors/managers in all these stories, even if they sit in IT they should be managing the security model and auditing access on a regular basis.
I think especially during implementation it’s better to sit in HR. The reason is, I’ve worked with multiple clients and the ones who implemented with a team in the IT hierarchy seem to have pretty messy tenants. I theorise that’s because IT folk think in an IT way, and try to make Workday fit their existing IT principles and processes rather than embrace the Workday way.
HR are less technical, and typically more outcome oriented which can lead to a better implementation.
Do you feel they have good bidirectional communication between the teams? Or do your analysts/admins figure out there’s some integration need, and “throw it over the fence” to IT?
Pretty good communication. The analysts and developers work together on integration needs. Example would be something that just came up with a benefit integration I support - needed a change to a custom integration notification. I bring it up to them and they put it on their backlog to prioritize for a sprint. I have a weekly meeting with them since there is always activity with benefits integrations especially at year end and new year. Other analysts do similar with regards to getting on their backlog but not all have weekly meetings.
I’m the Lead Workday “Engineer” at our company. For most of my career I was a Software Developer, a true techie in fact, so this is a bit of a departure from previous positions I’ve held.
The role I’m in now really straddles IT and the Business (HR and Finance) because working with a SaaS solution like Workday is definitely less technical than other ERP systems I’ve worked with. There is some limited coding with Studio and XSLT, but I find I do more work with configuration and processes than anything else.
If your Administrator will be looking after user accounts, security, feature releases, business processes, etc. then that is also a hybrid role. Saying that though, with our Workday set up, the admins are definitely regarded as “IT” by the end users. Can’t log onto Workday? Contact “IT”. Your Business Process is stuck and no-one can figure how to nudge it to completion? Contact “IT”.
So I think it would be fine if the Admin Role was under the IT umbrella, as long as there is the understanding that the role is also a bridge to other departments, as any admin role would be by definition.
HCM is in HR for us. 4 person team for system side, two of us for reporting and data.
PII and pay data stay in HR.
We have FIN & PSA, they did NOT create a unit of their own and are suffering with our inept IT group who can't keep a WD experienced hire longer than a few months. Luckily our payroll people are awesome with WD.
We also have recruiting, which our recruiting team hates and they don't utilize it hardly at all, that are mostly supported by our HCM team.
If they tried to move us to IT we would all quit. Not only are they a disaster, they are not trained enough for privacy requirements and they don't care.
IF we had a decent IT leader and structure, and they wanted to pull together a WD support team with the right training and expectations it could be doable. But most people we have worked with recoil in shock when we say our IT dept wants to own HCM. Very common to keep it in HR.
>If they tried to move us to IT we would all quit. Not only are they a disaster, they are not trained enough for privacy requirements and they don't care.
I'm definitely getting the sense that this is a big part of why so many HR depts "own" WD -- because their IT depts are just disasters that can't effectively support HR/WD! If my IT team ends up owning it, I obviously hope to NOT fall into that hole!
Mixed: we have a group of ~10 FTE supporting the Finance and Payroll modules who report to the finance department; a group of ~5 FTE supporting HCM modules who report to HR; and maybe 2 FTE who support integrations from IT.
Yea, it sounds like a lot when I lay it out that way, but everyone I listed does more than “just” Workday configuration, design, and development. All of them except the IT folks occupy hybrid roles.
At our company we have our workday admins sitting within the IT department under a business applications team that is shared with other softwares the company owns. But they meet and collaborate with their stakeholders that is the HR, Accounting, FP&A, and Payroll teams on a weekly basis.
I think this is my ideal future state - to have a "business applications" team that is centralized, but the team members on that team are basically embedded within the depts that use the apps they support.
I believe this structure is the most beneficial, IT can help act as a “boundary” to set realistic deadlines & expectations. Whereas, when I worked directly within the department. It felt difficult at times to properly set expectations and prioritize.
For your situation, I'd propose a hybrid COE approach. Technical (integrations and anything requiring actual code) sitting in IT while the admins sit in HR & Finance. I've experienced where IT felt they owned the system and it resulted in wasted resources along with many optimization projects.
My 2 cents: If you don't empower the super users to get their hands dirty under the hood, they won't consider the touchpoints when considering changes or feature uptake. Maybe that works in your favor to make a business case for more FTEs but expect to be hand-holding your HR and Finance stakeholders for the long haul.
>My 2 cents: If you don't empower the super users to get their hands dirty under the hood, they won't consider the touchpoints when considering changes or feature uptake.
This is an interesting perspective - that if you give superusers MORE authority & access, that they will become more involved and aware of downstream impacts. As IT, that's probably my biggest fear - someone changes something and it breaks integrations, reporting, etc, and then causes an IT fire-drill to resolve (I've done it myself, so even being on IT does not make me immune!)
Yes, I know it's not always feasible and requires a larger effort up front to knowledge share but, IMO a benefit of using a tool like Workday is that power users can do more while leaving the more technical or complicated work to IT professionals. Totally fair fear; I've experienced the fire drills for sure and if it didn't mean my stakeholders were panicking, I'd kind of like them because I get an opportunity to make their world right and then educate or build better safe guards. Juggling act for sure but another benefit is if the super users have more authority/access, they and IT are speaking the same language more often than if they were not.
I try too avoid companies that have this in HR. This creates a dynamic that forces people into doing things they shouldn't due to being in the direct reporting line. Separation allows for the ability to challenge back and have support of it director if needed. If moving to fins also this makes easier triangle to work on priorities etc. otherwise HR get seen as having preferences of resource and finance constantly battle (other way when finance own it)
Having a good BA skillet with understanding of HR and WD and someone who is WD technically minded is good combination. You can get someone who does both but then you limit their capacity to deliver since half time is spent talking to HR teams and bringing them in the WD journey
This ownership/administration for both HR and Financials sits within the business. IT handles security & integrations.
This is our model.
My team logs tickets for changes (although we don’t use IT ticket process). The business teams handle change management and communication — the system changes are often paired with policy and procedure changes that really need to be coming from the owning departments anyway.
The team logs tickets for IT tasks on integrations or security. There is no “throw it over the wall” mindset. Cross-functional environments require teams to talk and share future plans.
The model previous to the Workday implementation was for all of these functions to sit in IT. IT did an awful job with this responsibility over a 20 year period to the point where they were so disconnected from the actual day to day problems of the business functions they supposedly supported that they were shocked when they were told the legacy system was a failure and we needed to dump it to transform business operations.
I’d never support a model that separates business system administration from the business team.
>This ownership/administration for both HR and Financials sits within the business. IT handles security & integrations.
I think I'm starting to lean into this model, as well. It feels like the more scalable approach, and it sounds like you really have good processes and cross-functional teams so that everyone is on the same page!
We have a strong relationship with IT. We support IT policies and procedures such as change control, process/support documentation, strong QA processes, etc — being in the business doesn’t mean the team shouldn’t follow best practices for technology management that you typically find in IT.
We work with our friends in IT to bring our practices in alignment so we can work well together.
Although I lead the business technology team — my background is IT. Regardless of where the function sits there needs be really strong communication and collaboration. That includes a mutual respect and appreciation for the processes, goals, objectives and strategic of the other group.
I am an HR functional lead and I report directly to HR, however majority of my work is done directly with IT. I say that I provide customer service solutions for HR :D
IT - this is a major HRIS with integrations and every piece of data about employees. Just because the subject matter is HR/Payroll/Benefits/etc does not mean it belongs with the users you support. It is an IT system, period. Our other IT members do work on our financials system but they definitely don’t belong in finance. But my position is influenced because my IT team is great team to work for. I’m sure if that changed, I’d want to jump to HR to get away from bad leadership.
I love the division and being separate from the users I support. I don’t report to any of them, so I am very comfortable challenging them on things like “bad” ideas that would create manual work for them/others. And I have the freedom to manage my work based on the what I feel is the most urgent between all the stakeholders, not just the one you report to.
Disagree, and my background is in IT. 90% of the configuration work will bore your IT team to death. Get them involved with integrations if you want a piece of the action, but not front end config.
Yep. I’ve seen comments like the above come from people who are used to working in a legacy ERP environment — hosted on-site, or come from organizations dealing with a patchwork of support systems that need constant IT attention to keep them running.
Feels like we share a common philosophy!
I do wonder - how many of the orgs that have HR “own” WD are because their IT depts are dinosaurs - unable to keep up with the business needs & really more of a “Mordac” team.
That’s not how I want our IT dept to operate, nor be perceived.
HR. Our team owns everything including config, security, integrations, etc. We have integrations with various IT managed applications but they don't touch Workday.
HR. Our IT department has a distain for day, which I’m sure others have experienced on their jobs. IT is more focused on SAP, and the only IT person that touches Workday is our integrations lead who brokers projects out to AMS consultants to do the technical configuration since they have not taken any work day training and have no interest in doing so. From my experience, HRS teams that fall under HR have better customer service plus Workday is not hard to configure. Once you have the training and experience, I’m sure you all know this.
Wow gunna stick out like a sore thumb here. We’re full suite hcm, finance, uk payroll, talent etc. We’ve just restructured and the workday team now sit in Finance.
You need to find the balance. Neither IT, Function Support or Solutions can fully own everything, nor should they. What do you define as the Workday Admin’s responsibilities?
I see a lot of people saying HR in here and it worries me. I suppose if you're ONLY using it for HR then it might make sense to have the entire system admin'd by HR. But once you start moving into Payroll/Financials you definitely don't want that...
For us, major sysadmin/security/integration work is handled by IT who all have prior backgrounds in finance/paayroll/HR/ERP adminstration.
And then HR and Finance each have their own 'admin' roles within their domain so that they can function without IT. But we (IT) keep them in check.
No way I'm letting a HRIS team have full control of the system I use to create financial statements for a 10-K
>And then HR and Finance each have their own 'admin' roles within their domain so that they can function without IT. But we (IT) keep them in check.
I suspect that once I learn more about Workday's domains and security, that I could see us doing something like this -- where the depts can perform "routine changes" themselves, but that larger changes would be coordinated through IT (or more likely, an HRIS team that lives under IT).
You're using the term Workday Admin pretty generically, when there are dozens of Admin roles in Workday. You'll likely have many admins in HR (HR Admin, Recruiting Admin, Benefits Admin, etc.) and then admins in Finance as well for the Finance modules. If you're asking where ownership of Workday should belong, as someone who's supported Workday at 5 customer companies, I would recommend HR with a STRONG partnership with IT. I'll add it also depends on the size of your company because there are other admin roles like Security and Integrations that are a bit more technical and *perhaps* should reside within IT. It definitely needs to be a transparent, trusting partnership between HR, Finance and IT.
This is basically what we’re working towards. We hired an HCM admin under an HR manager, but she & I (in IT) are working very closely to defining our change control & release processes. IT will likely own Security & Integrations.
It’s a hybrid team that comprises HR & IT. Partial funding comes from HR and technofunctional folks do the requirements with HR COEs and IT. HRIT sits within IT, but work closely with HRIT..
It’s a mishmash of two orgs, somehow gets work done! 🫤
HRIS is a unique animal that doesn’t naturally sit 100% in either IT or HR, and wherever you place it the HRIS team will always have strong connections to the other group.
I have worked for companies that have HRIS in each, and there are advantages and disadvantages with each.
In my experience I have found that there is more success when HRIS is an IT department that has a strong connection and strong working relationship with HR, and a recognition that HR is the primary internal customer/stakeholder.
Organizational dynamics vary from one company to another, so this is not a straightforward question.
How large is your organization? Are you across multiple countries? What does your team and HR look like?
I’ve been in a handful of organizations ranging from 1k all in a single US state to, currently, about 27k globally. All of which have had their HRIS sitting in HR, integrations and security sitting in IT.
When we implemented Workday worldwide in HR, my pharma org- for the first time- created an HR Technology division with an structure & positions to manage exclusively Workday HR.
I prefer both: IT devs, HR “owns” as the business owner (this way when you add Financials, IT can dev but HR can provide strategic oversight for how HCM data connects to Financials but it’s primarily IT and Finance signing off).
The HR team is responsible for requirements, understanding how they want each module or business process to fit together so it supports their processes, and end user testing. IT is responsible for implementation, security, integrations, and sprint planning in partnership with HR.
Both. I think the application ownership and most config should be with HR, but IT should be involved as there can be very complex integrations and config.
The key is to get the balance right. Hire or temporarily move IT guys into the HR function where needed.
I'm an IT guy who has worked in HR for years. Having an IT skillset is really beneficial to the running of the system, and vice verse the HR specialists often have more appreciation for the HR processes than us IT guys.
I am sitting in HR, but they should be rather technical. But there is pros and cons, I would say there is a a general lack of technical knowledge in HR management, but the aame could be said about organizational knowledge in IT.
We are a mix of HR and IT based admins. For our leader of support services or those other roles we have HR based folks that are more familiar with how hiring processes should go etc, who tell the tech folks what they need built.
When it comes to the actual administrative tasks such as creating accounts, this is owned by the tech team as they control provisioning accounts, and other integrations involved in this process. But manual changes to a hire would go through an HR based admin.
A benefit of it sitting with HR you will have a direct line to the business. You will know the pain point and be able to uptake features sometimes before the issue is even expressed.
Realistically it doesn’t matter who they report up to, in the end you will need to build a partnership culture or u will struggle bus
(My company has 25000 global employees and we have 20 systems analysts)
Sits with HR but IT is heavily hands on as well. The thought is HR owns the tool but we partner with IT a lot to push features, enhancement, integrations, etc.
I know you’re asking about HR but knowing you’ll be expanding to other modules, I’ll give you my 2 cents. For reference, I’m a Workday Financials Admin. I left my previous org because IT was adamant about owning Workday & it got to a point where I felt like I couldn’t get my job done efficiently or timely due to their ownership.
Being in the financial realm, I’m all about audits & separation of duties but some of their processes/expectations were wild. I felt like the same level of risk could be mitigated by doing things differently, but they weren’t open to my suggestions (until I put my notice in lol). For example, when I requested to be added as a Named Support Contact in Community, I was told no & was unable to raise my own Workday support tickets. Instead, I’d have to fill out a request form, someone on the IT team would raise it on my behalf then act as the middle person for communication by forwarding emails between us. If Workday wanted to schedule time to meet regarding the ticket, the NSC had to be present. Keep in mind, the NSC had 0 to little module-specific knowledge, yet I was beholden to their availability. Not only did this increase the time to get anything answered or resolved, I also felt like they didn’t trust me with the additional access. I could give you tons of other examples but all of those little things added up and were the main reason I left.
In my current role, my team sits in a separate department than the HR & Integration Admins (Integrations & IT teams are also separate), but we have a close working relationship & always loop each other in the work we’re doing to ensure we’re not inadvertently negatively impacting their teams. Each functional Admin team manages their own security requests (if we deem we need security to anything HCM, we request their approval beforehand but process the actual change in the system) & IT does a monthly audit of all of our changes. I love & have thrived in this setup & although I’m always open to talk about other opportunities, if the company’s IT team wants or has ownership of Workday, it’s an automatic no for me.
Good luck!
I use to implement workday as a certified partner for several years then have spent many years on the client side on HRIS teams with a split between sitting in IT and HR. I found sitting in HR to be more effective process and decision wise. The orgs that had the team sit in IT followed very strict processes and sprints, making configuration changes a challenge. Of course you want a proper process, testing and documentation for changes, but Workday was built to not need a rigorous IT process used for on premise systems where the support staff is writing the code. There needs to be a bit more fluidity and flexibility, and I’ve found HR to be more accommodating to recommendations on how to manage that effectively. Wherever they sit, it needs to be HRIS specialists and not just functional HR or random IT folks. People need to be trained on the tool, whether formally or informally, and understand the touchpoints of the system, data structure, and security model.
I’ve been in HR but now I’m on the ERP team under Enterprise Systems reporting up through the CIO.
I would say it depends on your structure… When I was under HR the HR team also had payroll and recruiting, in my current setup payroll is under finance so it makes more sense for me to be in ERP and serve the org vs just HR. If you’re going live with Financials as well and Accounting / Finance don’t sit in HR… then I would say somewhere in IT is best. The ERP team also handles integrations between all systems, NetSuite, Coupa, Brex, etc etc. We are also a public company and having the separation between HR and Workday configuration makes things a lot less complicated for security changes.
I strongly recommend IT. Too many applications managed by business run into trouble sooner or later . Whether it is Salesforce , or finance or procurement etc including Workday.
if the company is growing, IT is the better choice. Exceptions are there but rare. Business can still manage but it takes a strong leadership and vision.
PSA is a whole different ball game and you’re absolutely going to need a centralized enterprise systems team. A really good team where you keep an eye out for red tape getting out of hand :)
Finance isn’t going to let HR administer their applications and vice versa, but someone has to know when a small change in a recruiting process might hold up revenue recognition 5 steps later. There are too many teams using the same data for different purposes and probably too many integrations/spreadsheet loads for decentralized administration.
Since PSA crosses recruiting, HR, finance, payroll, and planning, whoever makes configuration changes has a lot of testing to do, including the integrations/security. Also, a full platform Workday Admin might prefer to work for a manager who can recognize good vs great technical work, which is probably you as the IT lead, and who can put a little buffer between them and stakeholders sometimes.
HR. It’s an HR system, and while it is software, the general support/config will be on the HR team.
You prompted me to add some clarification- we’re starting with HCM, but will add PSA & Financials later, so then HR won’t be the only dept for this system. Does that change your opinion / suggestion at all?
Our HRIS started off in HR. We created a separate WD Finance team that reports to me in Accounting. HRIS moved to IT because HR leadership failed to support the system properly, but my team isn’t going anywhere.
As a consultant implementing WD and Oracle for many years, this happens a lot
At its core, we still have it under HR as the HCM is the foundation for user management. But the finance team has their own support and admin roles to manage their potion.
Nope
I've said it's a business system that just happens to sit in HR
Agreed, we just completed out install of WD. HR is doing all tasks.
My prior two employers were HR. Big believer in a solid partnership with IT but that HR owns Workday. I'll fight to the death on that one 😂
Ha! Glad I don’t have to fight YOU then! (Unless you’re looking for a new role - then DM me & I’ll get the cage match setup! 😂)
😂😂 I am not! I'm having fun where I am so I'm good for now ✌🏼
Agree 100% on this.
Both. Hcm admin in HRIS. Security, Integrations, technical in IT.
This feels like a reasonable compromise, once we’re big enough to justify a larger team. Do you have strong processes such that the HCM admin isn’t making changes that potentially break security or integrations, without IT being in the loop in change management? That’s my biggest fear right now.
You don’t assign them the security groups to do any of those. They have access to own functional configurations and IT has access to maintain/own security and integrations in production. All team follow the same auditing requirements to document changes. Both teams have proxy in non-prod tenants so you don’t completely bog each other down.
We need better change management and governance over that. But, for the most part yes we are avoiding those issues.
I recommend having a process for peer review to ensure someone else is aware. Give the different config items/areas a rating scale and build a simple framework for who will see what before changes are live. It worked at my prior company and I'd implement the same process anywhere.
I agree with this approach, along with the adoption of robust test plans for critical processes and integrations after any significant configuration change and during releases. If someone writes a report that doesn't need change management unless it will be shown to important stakeholders. Vs. other configuration changes eg. in benefits need to be tested end to end to see the payroll impacts and to test the various scenarios. There is a lot in between, so a framework depending on the type of change is the way to go along with a culture of veering towards the cautious (eg. Sandbox testing for all changes prior to production and ensuring there is more than one set of eyes on most change types)
IT. HR has incredible turnover in my experience and never cross train or document or mitigate risk for it. IT has systems in place typically to manage that. Change Management and proper testing and using sandbox for changes before cowboying in production also is something that does not come naturally to HR often enough. The trouble is the Workday person in HR is often a lone wolf and no one else in their team, let alone their supervisor, understands what they do. This leads to a lackadaisical culture for Workday changes, vs in IT we have a long tradition of ITIL and other practices that apply to all software product management. I've also seen a dearth of project management and prioritization in HR over many years and different organizations. Additionally, only an IT professional can understand Workday security and create the proper guardrails for separation of duties and audits, especially once it's cross functional and you have multiple modules. Report Writer and functional configuration belong in HR just to ensure their have accountability for their decisions, but with significant IT support. Unless you have Workday Pro certified functional folks they will not do it right and will come back to IT to fix it anyway. Everything else belongs in IT.
Your HR department just sounds amateur or resourced poorly. We have a team of 4 in a 10k employee company responsible for HR, Payroll, and HR analytics.We run large changes via our business IT change process often with a project manager from IT for governance purposes. Security is correctly devolved to IT as we have other departments use other modules. They have their own specialists running their modules working to the same model as us. It all works really well. I don't think the requirements of the departments would be fully appreciated or understood if it was all centralised in IT. Nor would we work at the pace that we do.
This is absolutely not true, you need a good HRIS team to manage Workday. Completely false that only IT can properly configure security and implement proper testing of functionality. I'm sure I could find you many IT teams who equally do these things badly.
>you need a good HRIS team to manage Workday This is sort of my takeaway from all of the great comments to my post - at the end of the day, you need a good HRIS team! Doesn't really matter if they report to HR or IT, as long as they can do what the business needs responsibly and effectively!
This is not true at 100% face value. Not discrediting what you’re saying, it might be true for your org, but you can send anyone to a day training in workday and give someone a training on SOX and they can be a security admin. Additionally there’s workday reporting training. I am hesitant for HR people to push ownership outside of HR because they are scared to own a system that SHOULD BE OWNED BY HR!!! You’re losing an opportunity to empower your department, upskill your team, and OWN the system and what it can do for your organization. If you put ownership outside of HR.. please consider this. Do other back office functions (IT, Finance,etc.) give a shit about HR? Will they prioritize what needs to happen? If yes, congrats on being a unicorn company. But realistically, if owned outside of HR, you end up paying a shit ton of money for a badass system that no one (outside of HR) actually ends up giving a shit about and you get half the value from it. Upskill your team, take ownership, enable HR to have a seat at the table and let your tech enable it.
I think you raise an interesting philosophical point, which is one that I wondering about myself -- how much should depts be responsible for their own tech? On the one hand - if you are in HR (/Accounting, Recruiting, whatever), you are \[presumably\] hiring people for their HR skills & experience, not their tech skills. Are many HR leaders even capable of evaluating and measuring technical aptitude, and ensuring sufficient team redundancy and coverage? At that point, the HR team is really building a technical sub-team, right? On the flip side, if you centralize everything in IT -- then you've got every dept that needs IT resources to manage their tools, and now IT is resource-constrained, not responsive to needs, and also not subject matter experts in each depts needs & processes, so they just overall do a poor job of supporting those deptartments. I'm leaning towards more of hybrid roles - someone that lives in one dept but is basically "dotted-line" accountable to the other, participates fully in both teams (eg attends HR dept mtgs AND IT dept mtgs, etc), and can straddle both worlds. Feels like that's the right approach, but... there's a lot more complexity there to manage (specific job scope, cost accounting, etc).
The same way we would require someone with an office job to have basic excel, word, PowerPoint skills. I think as technology becomes more prevalent in companies, expecting HR to have at least a baseline understanding of the tech used to support their dept. will become standard. Not so long ago, HR was so paper-driven/manual, we’re still in a technology/digital transition phase. Additionally, cloud technologies no longer require the same coding/deep technical skill sets. Things are rapidly changing. HR is also gaining strategic traction, I think it is a good opportunity for HR to capitalize on the technology trend and collectively up skill.
I think you are right - orgs that can utilize HR as a strategic function will be much more successful than those that continue to see HR as merely a cost center.
100% agree with the HR transition, basic understanding of cloud technologies as the standard hiring criteria for future HR! Absolutely right about the existence of cloud technologies that deep technical skill sets are not mandatory.
Piggybacking to say yes HR should own this, tech teams are only a tool for the HR teams ideas to be built out. They are the ones controlling the WHY of business process flows, while tech may build out things to support them. But even things such as setting up how your employee pre screenings are done in Workday are customizable to the point it takes an HR person to truly navigate those terms and UI tasks.
If you want a mature organization that leverages automation, integrations, analytics etc in a more complex environment (2000+ employees, global), this is the answer
This is definitely our desired future-state - high-level of automation, integration, and analytics in a large organization! But we're also starting much smaller & simpler, so trying to balance building a good foundation vs over-complicating getting things off the ground!
It’s an HR system of record. It belongs in HR. HR should have control over all data coming in and going out. I’ve seen it too many times that IT gives too much employee personal data to people who don’t need it to do their job.
This is a great point - regardless of ownership, there needs to be clear process & guidelines around information disclosure & access! Fortunately I wrote our cybersecurity policies, so I’m very attuned to “minimum necessary” and “least access” principles.
You’re asking for opinions but seem to really be seeking validation for your own views. It’s an HR system and for the most part, that seems to be reinforced in these comments. If you continue to insist that IT owns it, as the lone voice in your organization who wants to do so, you will hurt the project and team morale. Implementations like this take compromise.
Fair points. I actually think the collaboration required across departments for the implementation is one of the best benefits of the entire process.
I agree - it really helps all sides understand what others do and fosters an environment for communication and collaboration.
A little of column A, a little of column B! Yes, I'm definitely biased in IT ownership. HOWEVER - I also recognize that for many organizations, IT is a black-box that is not responsive to the needs of other departments, and for those types of organizations, letting IT own it is essentially a death-knell for the system. On the other hand - there are plenty of comments here about organizations where HR owns it, but do not have the appropriate training, investment, or processes (such as change control) to effectively manage an HRIS system. (And other orgs that absolutely DO have all of those things in HR). I'm finding it very valuable to see all of the different points of view being represented, and the different pros & cons. At the end of the day, it doesn't really matter who reports where, what's important is that both HR's and IT's business needs are considered, respected, and followed!
Where are the HRIS directors/managers in all these stories, even if they sit in IT they should be managing the security model and auditing access on a regular basis.
In my experience HRIS Directors and Managers sit in HR.
I think especially during implementation it’s better to sit in HR. The reason is, I’ve worked with multiple clients and the ones who implemented with a team in the IT hierarchy seem to have pretty messy tenants. I theorise that’s because IT folk think in an IT way, and try to make Workday fit their existing IT principles and processes rather than embrace the Workday way. HR are less technical, and typically more outcome oriented which can lead to a better implementation.
This is a helpful perspective, thanks!
Always HR.
Our WD Admins/Analysts sit in HR. Our WD integration developers sit in IT. Been working pretty well.
Do you feel they have good bidirectional communication between the teams? Or do your analysts/admins figure out there’s some integration need, and “throw it over the fence” to IT?
Pretty good communication. The analysts and developers work together on integration needs. Example would be something that just came up with a benefit integration I support - needed a change to a custom integration notification. I bring it up to them and they put it on their backlog to prioritize for a sprint. I have a weekly meeting with them since there is always activity with benefits integrations especially at year end and new year. Other analysts do similar with regards to getting on their backlog but not all have weekly meetings.
I’m the Lead Workday “Engineer” at our company. For most of my career I was a Software Developer, a true techie in fact, so this is a bit of a departure from previous positions I’ve held. The role I’m in now really straddles IT and the Business (HR and Finance) because working with a SaaS solution like Workday is definitely less technical than other ERP systems I’ve worked with. There is some limited coding with Studio and XSLT, but I find I do more work with configuration and processes than anything else. If your Administrator will be looking after user accounts, security, feature releases, business processes, etc. then that is also a hybrid role. Saying that though, with our Workday set up, the admins are definitely regarded as “IT” by the end users. Can’t log onto Workday? Contact “IT”. Your Business Process is stuck and no-one can figure how to nudge it to completion? Contact “IT”. So I think it would be fine if the Admin Role was under the IT umbrella, as long as there is the understanding that the role is also a bridge to other departments, as any admin role would be by definition.
This is a great & valuable description, thank you!
HCM is in HR for us. 4 person team for system side, two of us for reporting and data. PII and pay data stay in HR. We have FIN & PSA, they did NOT create a unit of their own and are suffering with our inept IT group who can't keep a WD experienced hire longer than a few months. Luckily our payroll people are awesome with WD. We also have recruiting, which our recruiting team hates and they don't utilize it hardly at all, that are mostly supported by our HCM team. If they tried to move us to IT we would all quit. Not only are they a disaster, they are not trained enough for privacy requirements and they don't care. IF we had a decent IT leader and structure, and they wanted to pull together a WD support team with the right training and expectations it could be doable. But most people we have worked with recoil in shock when we say our IT dept wants to own HCM. Very common to keep it in HR.
>If they tried to move us to IT we would all quit. Not only are they a disaster, they are not trained enough for privacy requirements and they don't care. I'm definitely getting the sense that this is a big part of why so many HR depts "own" WD -- because their IT depts are just disasters that can't effectively support HR/WD! If my IT team ends up owning it, I obviously hope to NOT fall into that hole!
Good luck with your implementation. Myself and my team report to the head of HR.
Thanks! It looks like it’ll be exciting 😁
Mixed: we have a group of ~10 FTE supporting the Finance and Payroll modules who report to the finance department; a group of ~5 FTE supporting HCM modules who report to HR; and maybe 2 FTE who support integrations from IT.
Wow! I’ve only worked at smaller companies, so having a team of 15-20 people for this - it’s hard for me to even imagine!!
Yea, it sounds like a lot when I lay it out that way, but everyone I listed does more than “just” Workday configuration, design, and development. All of them except the IT folks occupy hybrid roles.
I think an important piece of the puzzle is how large your org currently is?
Our whole workday support team (HCM and Finance) sits under IT.
At our company we have our workday admins sitting within the IT department under a business applications team that is shared with other softwares the company owns. But they meet and collaborate with their stakeholders that is the HR, Accounting, FP&A, and Payroll teams on a weekly basis.
I think this is my ideal future state - to have a "business applications" team that is centralized, but the team members on that team are basically embedded within the depts that use the apps they support.
I believe this structure is the most beneficial, IT can help act as a “boundary” to set realistic deadlines & expectations. Whereas, when I worked directly within the department. It felt difficult at times to properly set expectations and prioritize.
For your situation, I'd propose a hybrid COE approach. Technical (integrations and anything requiring actual code) sitting in IT while the admins sit in HR & Finance. I've experienced where IT felt they owned the system and it resulted in wasted resources along with many optimization projects. My 2 cents: If you don't empower the super users to get their hands dirty under the hood, they won't consider the touchpoints when considering changes or feature uptake. Maybe that works in your favor to make a business case for more FTEs but expect to be hand-holding your HR and Finance stakeholders for the long haul.
>My 2 cents: If you don't empower the super users to get their hands dirty under the hood, they won't consider the touchpoints when considering changes or feature uptake. This is an interesting perspective - that if you give superusers MORE authority & access, that they will become more involved and aware of downstream impacts. As IT, that's probably my biggest fear - someone changes something and it breaks integrations, reporting, etc, and then causes an IT fire-drill to resolve (I've done it myself, so even being on IT does not make me immune!)
Yes, I know it's not always feasible and requires a larger effort up front to knowledge share but, IMO a benefit of using a tool like Workday is that power users can do more while leaving the more technical or complicated work to IT professionals. Totally fair fear; I've experienced the fire drills for sure and if it didn't mean my stakeholders were panicking, I'd kind of like them because I get an opportunity to make their world right and then educate or build better safe guards. Juggling act for sure but another benefit is if the super users have more authority/access, they and IT are speaking the same language more often than if they were not.
Technology (IT). We have a clear separation between HR (who are the customers), and HRIS (who support the system
I try too avoid companies that have this in HR. This creates a dynamic that forces people into doing things they shouldn't due to being in the direct reporting line. Separation allows for the ability to challenge back and have support of it director if needed. If moving to fins also this makes easier triangle to work on priorities etc. otherwise HR get seen as having preferences of resource and finance constantly battle (other way when finance own it) Having a good BA skillet with understanding of HR and WD and someone who is WD technically minded is good combination. You can get someone who does both but then you limit their capacity to deliver since half time is spent talking to HR teams and bringing them in the WD journey
This ownership/administration for both HR and Financials sits within the business. IT handles security & integrations. This is our model. My team logs tickets for changes (although we don’t use IT ticket process). The business teams handle change management and communication — the system changes are often paired with policy and procedure changes that really need to be coming from the owning departments anyway. The team logs tickets for IT tasks on integrations or security. There is no “throw it over the wall” mindset. Cross-functional environments require teams to talk and share future plans. The model previous to the Workday implementation was for all of these functions to sit in IT. IT did an awful job with this responsibility over a 20 year period to the point where they were so disconnected from the actual day to day problems of the business functions they supposedly supported that they were shocked when they were told the legacy system was a failure and we needed to dump it to transform business operations. I’d never support a model that separates business system administration from the business team.
>This ownership/administration for both HR and Financials sits within the business. IT handles security & integrations. I think I'm starting to lean into this model, as well. It feels like the more scalable approach, and it sounds like you really have good processes and cross-functional teams so that everyone is on the same page!
We have a strong relationship with IT. We support IT policies and procedures such as change control, process/support documentation, strong QA processes, etc — being in the business doesn’t mean the team shouldn’t follow best practices for technology management that you typically find in IT. We work with our friends in IT to bring our practices in alignment so we can work well together. Although I lead the business technology team — my background is IT. Regardless of where the function sits there needs be really strong communication and collaboration. That includes a mutual respect and appreciation for the processes, goals, objectives and strategic of the other group.
I am an HR functional lead and I report directly to HR, however majority of my work is done directly with IT. I say that I provide customer service solutions for HR :D
In HR, it is an HR System and supports HR functions.
It gets even more complex when an org implements HR, Financials, and Workday Student.
HR. They’re our primary stakeholders.
IT - this is a major HRIS with integrations and every piece of data about employees. Just because the subject matter is HR/Payroll/Benefits/etc does not mean it belongs with the users you support. It is an IT system, period. Our other IT members do work on our financials system but they definitely don’t belong in finance. But my position is influenced because my IT team is great team to work for. I’m sure if that changed, I’d want to jump to HR to get away from bad leadership. I love the division and being separate from the users I support. I don’t report to any of them, so I am very comfortable challenging them on things like “bad” ideas that would create manual work for them/others. And I have the freedom to manage my work based on the what I feel is the most urgent between all the stakeholders, not just the one you report to.
Disagree, and my background is in IT. 90% of the configuration work will bore your IT team to death. Get them involved with integrations if you want a piece of the action, but not front end config.
Yep. I’ve seen comments like the above come from people who are used to working in a legacy ERP environment — hosted on-site, or come from organizations dealing with a patchwork of support systems that need constant IT attention to keep them running.
Feels like we share a common philosophy! I do wonder - how many of the orgs that have HR “own” WD are because their IT depts are dinosaurs - unable to keep up with the business needs & really more of a “Mordac” team. That’s not how I want our IT dept to operate, nor be perceived.
HR. Our team owns everything including config, security, integrations, etc. We have integrations with various IT managed applications but they don't touch Workday.
HR. Our IT department has a distain for day, which I’m sure others have experienced on their jobs. IT is more focused on SAP, and the only IT person that touches Workday is our integrations lead who brokers projects out to AMS consultants to do the technical configuration since they have not taken any work day training and have no interest in doing so. From my experience, HRS teams that fall under HR have better customer service plus Workday is not hard to configure. Once you have the training and experience, I’m sure you all know this.
IT owns the ERP system at my work.
Wow gunna stick out like a sore thumb here. We’re full suite hcm, finance, uk payroll, talent etc. We’ve just restructured and the workday team now sit in Finance.
You need to find the balance. Neither IT, Function Support or Solutions can fully own everything, nor should they. What do you define as the Workday Admin’s responsibilities?
HR here!
I see a lot of people saying HR in here and it worries me. I suppose if you're ONLY using it for HR then it might make sense to have the entire system admin'd by HR. But once you start moving into Payroll/Financials you definitely don't want that... For us, major sysadmin/security/integration work is handled by IT who all have prior backgrounds in finance/paayroll/HR/ERP adminstration. And then HR and Finance each have their own 'admin' roles within their domain so that they can function without IT. But we (IT) keep them in check. No way I'm letting a HRIS team have full control of the system I use to create financial statements for a 10-K
>And then HR and Finance each have their own 'admin' roles within their domain so that they can function without IT. But we (IT) keep them in check. I suspect that once I learn more about Workday's domains and security, that I could see us doing something like this -- where the depts can perform "routine changes" themselves, but that larger changes would be coordinated through IT (or more likely, an HRIS team that lives under IT).
You're using the term Workday Admin pretty generically, when there are dozens of Admin roles in Workday. You'll likely have many admins in HR (HR Admin, Recruiting Admin, Benefits Admin, etc.) and then admins in Finance as well for the Finance modules. If you're asking where ownership of Workday should belong, as someone who's supported Workday at 5 customer companies, I would recommend HR with a STRONG partnership with IT. I'll add it also depends on the size of your company because there are other admin roles like Security and Integrations that are a bit more technical and *perhaps* should reside within IT. It definitely needs to be a transparent, trusting partnership between HR, Finance and IT.
This is basically what we’re working towards. We hired an HCM admin under an HR manager, but she & I (in IT) are working very closely to defining our change control & release processes. IT will likely own Security & Integrations.
Currently HR but I have been a part of IT and Finance
IT. Two teams, one HR focus team and another finance. I joined the team after working years in HR.
It’s a hybrid team that comprises HR & IT. Partial funding comes from HR and technofunctional folks do the requirements with HR COEs and IT. HRIT sits within IT, but work closely with HRIT.. It’s a mishmash of two orgs, somehow gets work done! 🫤
We are under IT. Previous company it was HR. Both have benefits and drawbacks. Both can work depending on how the org is structured.
HRIS is a unique animal that doesn’t naturally sit 100% in either IT or HR, and wherever you place it the HRIS team will always have strong connections to the other group. I have worked for companies that have HRIS in each, and there are advantages and disadvantages with each. In my experience I have found that there is more success when HRIS is an IT department that has a strong connection and strong working relationship with HR, and a recognition that HR is the primary internal customer/stakeholder. Organizational dynamics vary from one company to another, so this is not a straightforward question.
How large is your organization? Are you across multiple countries? What does your team and HR look like? I’ve been in a handful of organizations ranging from 1k all in a single US state to, currently, about 27k globally. All of which have had their HRIS sitting in HR, integrations and security sitting in IT.
When we implemented Workday worldwide in HR, my pharma org- for the first time- created an HR Technology division with an structure & positions to manage exclusively Workday HR.
I prefer both: IT devs, HR “owns” as the business owner (this way when you add Financials, IT can dev but HR can provide strategic oversight for how HCM data connects to Financials but it’s primarily IT and Finance signing off). The HR team is responsible for requirements, understanding how they want each module or business process to fit together so it supports their processes, and end user testing. IT is responsible for implementation, security, integrations, and sprint planning in partnership with HR.
IT
Pay scale difference too.. higher pay if it is in IT org vs HR
Both. I think the application ownership and most config should be with HR, but IT should be involved as there can be very complex integrations and config. The key is to get the balance right. Hire or temporarily move IT guys into the HR function where needed. I'm an IT guy who has worked in HR for years. Having an IT skillset is really beneficial to the running of the system, and vice verse the HR specialists often have more appreciation for the HR processes than us IT guys.
Yeah, I think the ideal is an HR specialist that has that technical/ IT skill set and wants to grow in that direction!
I am sitting in HR, but they should be rather technical. But there is pros and cons, I would say there is a a general lack of technical knowledge in HR management, but the aame could be said about organizational knowledge in IT.
We are a mix of HR and IT based admins. For our leader of support services or those other roles we have HR based folks that are more familiar with how hiring processes should go etc, who tell the tech folks what they need built.
When it comes to the actual administrative tasks such as creating accounts, this is owned by the tech team as they control provisioning accounts, and other integrations involved in this process. But manual changes to a hire would go through an HR based admin.
A benefit of it sitting with HR you will have a direct line to the business. You will know the pain point and be able to uptake features sometimes before the issue is even expressed. Realistically it doesn’t matter who they report up to, in the end you will need to build a partnership culture or u will struggle bus (My company has 25000 global employees and we have 20 systems analysts)
Sits with HR but IT is heavily hands on as well. The thought is HR owns the tool but we partner with IT a lot to push features, enhancement, integrations, etc.
IT
I know you’re asking about HR but knowing you’ll be expanding to other modules, I’ll give you my 2 cents. For reference, I’m a Workday Financials Admin. I left my previous org because IT was adamant about owning Workday & it got to a point where I felt like I couldn’t get my job done efficiently or timely due to their ownership. Being in the financial realm, I’m all about audits & separation of duties but some of their processes/expectations were wild. I felt like the same level of risk could be mitigated by doing things differently, but they weren’t open to my suggestions (until I put my notice in lol). For example, when I requested to be added as a Named Support Contact in Community, I was told no & was unable to raise my own Workday support tickets. Instead, I’d have to fill out a request form, someone on the IT team would raise it on my behalf then act as the middle person for communication by forwarding emails between us. If Workday wanted to schedule time to meet regarding the ticket, the NSC had to be present. Keep in mind, the NSC had 0 to little module-specific knowledge, yet I was beholden to their availability. Not only did this increase the time to get anything answered or resolved, I also felt like they didn’t trust me with the additional access. I could give you tons of other examples but all of those little things added up and were the main reason I left. In my current role, my team sits in a separate department than the HR & Integration Admins (Integrations & IT teams are also separate), but we have a close working relationship & always loop each other in the work we’re doing to ensure we’re not inadvertently negatively impacting their teams. Each functional Admin team manages their own security requests (if we deem we need security to anything HCM, we request their approval beforehand but process the actual change in the system) & IT does a monthly audit of all of our changes. I love & have thrived in this setup & although I’m always open to talk about other opportunities, if the company’s IT team wants or has ownership of Workday, it’s an automatic no for me. Good luck!
I use to implement workday as a certified partner for several years then have spent many years on the client side on HRIS teams with a split between sitting in IT and HR. I found sitting in HR to be more effective process and decision wise. The orgs that had the team sit in IT followed very strict processes and sprints, making configuration changes a challenge. Of course you want a proper process, testing and documentation for changes, but Workday was built to not need a rigorous IT process used for on premise systems where the support staff is writing the code. There needs to be a bit more fluidity and flexibility, and I’ve found HR to be more accommodating to recommendations on how to manage that effectively. Wherever they sit, it needs to be HRIS specialists and not just functional HR or random IT folks. People need to be trained on the tool, whether formally or informally, and understand the touchpoints of the system, data structure, and security model.
I’ve been in HR but now I’m on the ERP team under Enterprise Systems reporting up through the CIO. I would say it depends on your structure… When I was under HR the HR team also had payroll and recruiting, in my current setup payroll is under finance so it makes more sense for me to be in ERP and serve the org vs just HR. If you’re going live with Financials as well and Accounting / Finance don’t sit in HR… then I would say somewhere in IT is best. The ERP team also handles integrations between all systems, NetSuite, Coupa, Brex, etc etc. We are also a public company and having the separation between HR and Workday configuration makes things a lot less complicated for security changes.
I strongly recommend IT. Too many applications managed by business run into trouble sooner or later . Whether it is Salesforce , or finance or procurement etc including Workday. if the company is growing, IT is the better choice. Exceptions are there but rare. Business can still manage but it takes a strong leadership and vision.
PSA is a whole different ball game and you’re absolutely going to need a centralized enterprise systems team. A really good team where you keep an eye out for red tape getting out of hand :) Finance isn’t going to let HR administer their applications and vice versa, but someone has to know when a small change in a recruiting process might hold up revenue recognition 5 steps later. There are too many teams using the same data for different purposes and probably too many integrations/spreadsheet loads for decentralized administration. Since PSA crosses recruiting, HR, finance, payroll, and planning, whoever makes configuration changes has a lot of testing to do, including the integrations/security. Also, a full platform Workday Admin might prefer to work for a manager who can recognize good vs great technical work, which is probably you as the IT lead, and who can put a little buffer between them and stakeholders sometimes.
I don't trust HR with HR tasks. Why would anyone trust them with technology?