Workday Student Onsite

For the last days of January and first days of February, members of the Bowdoin Workday Student Project Team and consultants from our implemplementation partner Cognizant gathered in the meeting spaces at the Brunswick Hotel to discuss ways that Bowdoin's management of student and class information would shift as we continue to make configuration decisions about Workday.

An entire morning was dedicated to making careful choices about how Bowdoin would make use of Workday's Unified Duplicate Management Framework, or UDMF, to ensure we aren't inadvertently creating double records in cases where people have multiple personas at Bowdoin. If, for example, a local high schooler got a job at Bowdoin with Dining Services and then later was admitted as a student, or if a graduated student returned to Bowdoin years after commencement to take a job as a staff member, we would want to ensure that the person's new information was added to that prior record. Workday's UDMF processes help Bowdoin manage these checks and evaluate whether a new person record should be created or whether the new employee or student information matches with someone we already have in our system. 

Much time was dedicated to Change Management, or helping people and organizations prepare for change. Cognizant consultants asked the Bowdoin team lots of questions about how we work together and about our culture, ways we communicate information as a campus, and understanding how Bowdoin's student and class information was currently organized and managed.

And, of course, there was a snow storm smack in the middle of the whole thing.