Workday Terms to Know
Workday Terms to Know
Many Workday users at Bowdoin will be more casual users of the system, meaning you aren't part of the teams running the college's operation in back-end offices like HR, the Business Office, and the Registrar's Office. This list of starter terms is for you!
If you will be a primary user of Workday to execute your job, scroll down for a more in-depth list of terms.
Starter Terminology
Implementation Implementation is a verb! In its most literal sense, it means "to put into effect according to or by means of a definite plan or procedure." The process of moving our current processes into Workday is referred to as implementation.
Implementation Partner When organizations choose to use Workday to manage their operations, the implementation of this system is a huge undertaking, and even small decisions can have big impacts down the road. Workday therefore has all its clients work with Implementation Partners who help walk their clients through every single step of the process of moving from a legacy system (aka the old system) into the new system. The Implementation Partner helps make sure you make decisions that are in line with the Workday methodology while making sure you are able to carry out the processes you need to make the institution run.
Enterprise Systems (and ERP) Enterprise systems, which is shorthand for Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, are "central command" software systems that store an organization's data and allow that data to be used seamlessly across the organization. This means that information about a student or about an employee, or about the class schedule, or about a student's tuition bill, is all stored in one single system, with users interacting with all the same information in real-time. These systems can also help automate workflows, aid in real-time reporting, and provide greater security controls.
Self Service When you log in to Workday, you're logging in to Self Service, which allows employees and students to perform tasks for themselves. People who manage employees also have Manager Self Service, which allows supervisors to perform tasks that pertain to their managerial status, such as approving time sheets.
Inbox If you have tasks to do or notifications you need to review, you'll view these in your Workday inbox. When you log in to Self Service, if you have an action you you need to take or an item that needs your review, you'll see a number over your inbox alerting you that you need to do something.
Worklet When you log in to Workday's home page, you'll see your home page organized into specific areas that look like tiles, giving you easy access to resources, tasks, or information you need or use frequently. All of those tiles are called Worklets.
Integration When data needs to move between two systems, this linking of systems is referred to as an integration.
Dashboard Workday allows its customers to have access to very powerful dashboards where you'll have access to reports or other Worklets that pertain to you and the work you do.
In-Depth Terminology
Tenant A tenant is a “Workday Instance," or where Bowdoin “rents” space in the Workday cloud. Workday owns the apartment complex and Bowdoin rents a unit there. The walls and structure belong to Workday, but Bowdoin is in charge of the interior. Renting a unit from Workday gives you multiple types of tenants.
- Sandbox The Sandbox tenant is a copy of your Workday environment where you get to test out things you'd like to try before you actually put them into place for your users to see and interact with.
- Production The Production tenant is where our real, live data that the campus uses and interacts with on a day-to-day basis is housed.
- Preview We have another copy of Production that Workday refreshes 5 weeks before the two big releases. This is the tenant where customers can see what the new release looks like, turn on new features, see how new features affect what they already have configured. This tenant can be refreshed when Bowdoin wants/needs, so it is handy for trials that last longer than a week when the sandbox is continually refreshed.
Release Workday is constantly evolving -- to fix programming glitches, add new functionality, retire out of date resources, etc. And when they send those updates to their customers, this is referred to as a release. Workday has two major releases each year in March and September as well as Friday night weekly updates for small changes or hot fixes.
Community Workday customers can receive access to what they call "Community," which is an interactive space for customers from any industry to interact with each other. Here users can discuss Workday and share ideas, ask questions, get help and support, and learn about how their counterparts across the world are managing similar processes in their own environments. Customers can pitch ideas they have for improvements to Workday, and other users can vote on those ideas. Workday employees use and monitor the site as well, so it is a shared space between customers and Workday.
Business Object A business object is a piece of data in the enterprise system that has its own attributes and values, and has relationships to other business objects. You are a business object in Workday, and so is the office you work for.
Supervisory Organization Supervisory Organizations are the core of how Workday's HCM module is structured. This structural foundation groups employees into a management hierarchy. It is an awful lot like a digitized standard org chart, where offices are defined and management and coworker relationships are defined. In Workday, though, this structure helps make normally-complicated processes easier, like defaulting who can approve your timesheet if your manager is on vacation or what your security access in Workday is like based on where you fall within Bowdoin's organizational structure.
Configure Configuring is often conflated with customization (say that three times fast). Configuration is what you do to your software when you adjust its look and feel without changing its underlying code. This is the level of changes we can make to Workday. Because it exists in the cloud, we don't have access to the underlying code, so we have to leave the code exactly how Workday gives it to us, and we can make adjustments to our options. Think back to Workday being the apartment complex -- we don't get to change the walls, but we do get to decide on the furniture we bring in and how we arrange it.
Customize Customization, on the other hand, is where a developer does have access to the underlying code of a program or application and can make changes to its foundation. Customizing gives you a lot of control, but it can also make software brittle and complicated to maintain. This is why more and more software applications are going to the cloud rather than keeping them hosted onsite -- it's easier for the users to maintain themselves, and then the company's developers know that their customers are all on the same version of the product, making it easier to improve and update continuously.
Cloud vs On-Site Hosting When something is hosted "in the cloud," it means that your organization does not have to (or get to) maintain the application or program on your own servers. This is how your email account works, for example. You don't have to maintain your own server at your home to store the data kept in your inbox -- Google does that for you in its own servers. On-site hosting means the organization has to (or gets to) host all those lines of code for the application on its own servers. That gives the organization access to the code, which gives them more freedom to customize, but it also comes with the risk of needing to keep those servers maintained and updated, and to keep all that extra data and equipment safe and secure.
Foundation Data Model (FDM) Workday's Foundation Data Model (FDM) is a multi-dimensional data structure that serves as the backbone for financial processing and reporting done within Workday. It is Workday's way of saying our "Chart of Accounts" and it's how offices will manage transactions. FDM allows Workday users to attach common keywords or “Worktags” to describe transactions for reporting and analysis.
Worktag Worktags are key words shared across business areas of the college that allow users to report on and analyze data more easily, and allow users to access and complete processes more intuitively.
Business Process You may have experienced a business process previously and heard it called a "workflow." Essentially, a business process is a sequence of one or more tasks that accomplishes a desired outcome. Some examples of business processes are allowing employees to select benefits or designating a direct deposit change.