Workday's Phil Wilmington talks FP&A futures
- Summary:
- Combining forecasting, planning and analysis (FP&A) into financials and HCM is a big change, says OutlookSoft, Tidemark veteran, now co-president at Workday
Workday's recent move into collaborative financial planning and analysis (FP&A) has brought the company into familiar territory for one of its most recent senior recruits. Phil Wilmington, who joined in February this year and was named co-president in June, has spent the previous eight years in the corporate performance management field, first as CEO of OutlookSoft, which SAP acquired in 2007, and then as president of Tidemark.
I met Wilmington last week on a visit to London and asked him to reflect on Workday's move into a product area with which he's so familiar. One of the most valuable effects, he said, will be to bring line-of-business leaders more closely into the planning and budgeting process.
The office of finance has many times been the office of a few that were providing information out to meet the needs of many.
FP&A was a lot about gathering and putting a budget together with very little time for forecasting and true analytics. That was one of the challenges that's always plagued the space.
Now, what we hear financial people talking about is the need for that information to be embraced by the business leaders. If you're working with the same tools that the FP&A group is working with, then you're a part of that budgeting process.
There's a greater level of accountability and ownership that's driven [by] ... the sharing of information at the edges of the enterprise, not just within the office of finance.
That in turn enables forecasting to become more of a continuous process that's better in tune with the always-on nature of business today, rather than being merely a quarterly reporting exercise, he added.
Statutory and compliance reporting were always 90-day windows or snapshots of the business. That is no longer a way to stay competitive. The forecasting process has to be continuous.
As [mobile] devices are in the hands of the business leaders who are closest to the customer — and where the decisions are made regarding expense, regarding where revenue is going — those need to feed a continuous forecasting process that drives business. That's exactly the space that our applications play in.
Customer adoption is key
Some observers, including diginomica's own Den Howlett ("the proof will be in the eating"), are taking a wait-and-see stance on Workday's offering, which is being prepared for general availability later next year. Wilmington told me that skepticism is based on experiences with "what is now viewed as antiquated technology capabilities," but agreed the customer proof points are key:
It will be interesting to prove this out and to have customers on a go-forward basis talk about their success with those applications.
We're in the process of engaging with those customers right now and then rolling out these applications so it's on the very near-term horizon that this will be proven out with our customers.
Early adopters will get the chance to get a march on their competition, he argued, drawing a parallel between Workday today and the emergence of PeopleSoft along with other client-server business solutions in the 1990s. At the time, many doubted whether those emerging alternatives could ever replace what was then called data processing.
As waves of technology get proven to the enterprise, companies have the opportunity to be the first to deliver benefits to their customers in these shifts of technology and that's when large growth in those companies take place.
Workday defines now the general and administrative space in the cloud, with information not only generated by the transactional engines which Workday brings to the table, but now also allowing analytic capabilities within the context of the same application.
There's certainly curiosity anytime a new deliverable begins to impact the marketplace, but those early adopting companies lead their industries because they look for innovation. Certainly what we're bringing to the marketplace is an innovative solution that hasn't been done before.
Having both HCM and financials data built into the same system is a step change compared to what was possible with OutlookSoft and Tidemark, he added.
We were not driving the transactional side of the business at Outlooksoft and Tidemark. We were taking information, and one of the first challenges is, how do you make that information consumable? How is it consistent? Where is it generated? Who owns the source systems and how do they get into the analytics engine?
Much of this is already resident in the HCM applications and now financial applications that Workday brings to the marketplace. It's a huge advantage.
Partner relationships
Wilmington's promotion to co-president brings him into a position he once held at PeopleSoft, whose co-founders went on to found Workday. In this role, he leads global sales and field operations as well as customer operations. So I took the opportunity to ask him about Workday's relationship with its partner ecosystem as it manages its growth.
We're making sure that, as we grow our company, we don't lose focus on the primary tenet of the company, and that's company satisfaction.
We can't take our eye off of that. As long as we maintain that level of customer satisfaction, then we can continue to intelligently grow our company. That intelligent growth has to be with the growth of an ecosystem, both that we fuel with our own employee numbers growing in customer service and customer success, but also our partners growing at the same rate.
The way that Workday has gone about that is to treat the ecosystem and the partners exactly the way you treat your own employee base as it relates to customer success. The administration of those resources needs to be just as diligent. Who's gone through what classes? What's the customer satisfaction rating of the engagements that those individual consultants have participated in?
So we treat our business partners very much like we treat our own associates in customer service and customer success. We also require the same adherence to the same standards.
Global data privacy
In view of the recent rejection of Safe Harbor arrangements, I also took the opportunity to ask about global standards for data privacy.
All global companies are impacted by these changing dynamics that relate to privacy and security.
We're doing everything from a process, from a staffing [and] an infrastructure standpoint to provide the security and the privacy that's necessary for us to be a valued business partner to global companies.
This information needs to be secure because it's extraordinarily confidential. It provides competitive advantage for our customers and it needs to have the highest privacy and security requirements applied to it. So, the discussions and decisions that resulted in last week's findings are just another step in that direction.
Should there be a consistent standard that is set to protect privacy rights across all companies that have global employees? I would think that that would certainly make our industry maybe a little easier to operate within. It's not something that we're banking on short-term and we need to be able to meet the standards as they impact the marketplace.
My take
It's Wilmington's job to lead sales so it's unsurprising to find him so bullish about Workday's prospects. His comments nevertheless underline how strongly the vendor believes that its combination of financials, HCM and analytics is a gamechanger for business administration. There is a lot riding on the success of the analytics offerings that it has started rolling out and which we'll see the full impact of once the collaborative forecasting tool joins the line-up next year. Those customer testimonials will be telling.
Personally, I find it surprising that the business software industry is not already delivering what Workday is now attempting to do. The idea of running forecasts and budgets in a completely separate silo from the systems that generate the data seems to me to be hopelessly old-fashioned in an era when business decisions have to be reviewed and updated on a weekly or daily basis. Only dying companies have five-year corporate plan these days.
The comparison to the emergence of client-server ERP systems in the 1990s is an interesting one. I've written before about the need for a new generation of business applications for the digital era. The old categories do need to be torn up and replaced by something that's more in tune with what today's technology can deliver to meet modern business needs. Workday of course is not the only vendor that has a view on what comes next — most have their own take and their own platform for achieving it.
Where Workday differs from many of its cloud rivals is in how tightly it manages not only its own platform but also the ecosystem around it, as Wilmington's comments confirm. From one point of view, this micro-management of the channel has served the company well, with customer satisfaction ratings that are virtually unheard-of in the world of enterprise business applications. But the counter-argument is that it constrains the potential for partners to introduce innovation and new thinking on top of the Workday platform that might accelerate progress into new market opportunities, particularly in vertical markets.
For now, Workday doesn't have to worry about missing out when it is still growing rapidly and there are so many businesses out there that simply need the agility and responsiveness of a well-engineered cloud solution. The focus has to be on rounding out the analytics component of its platform and then see what comes next. The coming year is shaping up to be a significant one for Workday's continuing evolution.
Disclosure: Workday is a diginomica premier partner.
Image credits: Chart graphics concept floating above business woman's outstretched hands, blue background © Sergey Nivens - Fotolia; headshot courtesy of Workday.