CIOs are under intense pressure to accelerate digital initiatives and innovation, while simplifying systems, and providing business insights in a secure environment. To meet these demands, CIOs need an extensible and adaptable platform and trusted source of data, says Workday.
Speaking ahead of a webinar on emerging technologies to drive business progress, Workday's enterprise architect, Auralia Edwards said CIOs are being asked to drive digital business transformation in partnership with business leaders with accountability to the CEO and board.
“CIOs are increasingly held accountable for digital business operational results. They feel pressure to reimagine a new era of hybrid work and are investing in technology that can automate business and IT processes to make employees' lives easier. CIOs also need the ability to empower finance and HR with self-service and drive a consistent and engaging employee experience through a solution that will continue to grow in value and adapt to changing technologies without disruption to IT or the business.”
Bringing AI and ML into transformation
Building the capability to rapidly innovate, to enhance employee experience and elevate human and enterprise performance is at the pinnacle of the IT hierarchy of needs, according to Workday.
Machine learning and other smart technologies have reached an inflection point where they are no longer siloed in separate applications, requiring data scientists to translate data and insights for business users − they can now be integrated throughout infrastructure to improve productivity through automation and faster, better decision-making.
Says Edwards: “Business leaders say that smart technology is driving digital growth, according to Workday’s latest Organizational Agility survey. We found that organisations that have made progress deploying artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) or robotic process automation (RPA) are more than twice as likely to report high levels of digital revenue as those that have made little or no progress.”
ML delivers value most rapidly by being built on a unified data core so that data is readily available for input and learning.
Aurelia Edwards, Workday.
With skills and time being scarce resources, IT needs ML to become a core part of their IT foundation and to be able to operate on their enterprise data, enabling automation and insight without introducing security risks, privacy concerns or unintentional bias.
“ML delivers value most rapidly by being built on a unified data core so that data is readily available for input and learning without having to be extracted out of context and serviced by external platforms and scarce data science resources. By having ML become core in their enterprise management applications, IT can expose the value of ML confidently and work with the business to align strategically on outcomes,” Edwards says.
Enterprise management in the cloud
Gartner, IDC and Forrester all agree that the future of ERP is ecosystems of composite apps or composable business capabilities running in the cloud on a trusted core. But not every cloud is the same. There are radical differences between built-for-the-cloud systems—or an enterprise management cloud—and existing systems that were simply migrated to a hosted data centre. While the “lift and shift” model may seem like a fast solution for finance and human resources (HR) teams, and the IT teams that support them, there’s a lot more to consider, says Workday.
“For instance, migrating legacy enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems to a hosted cloud infrastructure costs a lot upfront and requires additional investments down the road, as they need expensive upgrades at least every 4-6 years. Plus, moving a system that may be 10 or more years old into a vendor’s data centre will not deliver the agility, scalability, and security benefits required for success in today’s rapidly changing world," explains Edwards.
"The alternative—and better move—is to adopt an enterprise management cloud, delivered through a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model. While it requires a mindset shift alongside a technology change, a true enterprise management cloud is a more scalable, cost-effective solution—and comes with a whole host of additional user benefits.”
Workday has crafted ML into our Enterprise Management Cloud, at the core of its architecture, says Edwards. This enables it to tap into an increasing set of enterprise use cases that add intelligence, automation and insight, fuelled by the actions of over 45M workers and billions of business transactions.
Starting small
Workday enables IT teams to leverage emerging technology on a small scale via configurable security options, adds Edwards.
"You can limit who gets access to certain modules so that you only release it to a subset of users. An example of this is Workday Assistant − a digital assistant chatbot designed to help you conversationally complete tasks and retrieve information within Workday. This AI capability can be made available across the enterprise, or to a selection of users, empowering how users interact with tasks and data within Workday.”
Webinar on 19 August: Innovate forward or fall behind
Workday, in partnership with ITWeb, will host a webinar on 19 August on applying emerging technology to drive business progress.
This panel discussion will outline the data and smart technology trends and challenges facing enterprises today, what consultancy Analyse has uncovered around challenges facing CIOs in maximising data to drive innovation, and how Workday can help.
For more information and to register for this event, go to https://www.itweb.co.za/webinar/workday-innovate-forward-or-fall-behind/
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