Why we’ve created the Workday AMS Hidden Costs Calculator

We believe that support services should truly be supportive. Third-party support teams should care about your system as much as you do. But many of our ex-AMS clients tell us that their AMS partner didn’t help them advance their Workday system.

Instead, they found themselves paying for efforts that didn’t move them forward.

The reality of traditional Workday AMS

Application Management Services (AMS) are used, to some extent, by most Workday customers. Typically, if nothing goes wrong, we’re content and assume our AMS is doing fine.

However, changing the question from “Has anything gone wrong?” to “What’s getting better?” fundamentally shifts how we evaluate AMS.

Once you have an expectation that your AMS provider could be making your system better you will find many existing Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are counterproductive. Resolution time SLAs drive fix faster behaviour rather than root cause resolution. Some clients still pay on a per ticket basis which blatantly discourages AMS providers from finding proactive solutions and focusing on case avoidance.

One major issue we hear from former AMS clients is the lack of proactive engagement from their supplier. If you don’t ask or don’t have the knowledge or terminology to ask for something specific, you won’t get it.  Many clients openly admit that while their AMS providers didn’t upskill their team, or identify root causes, or make recommendations to prevent recurring issues it was most likely because they had never asked their provider to do so.

Consider, whether everything you spend on AMS translates into tangible improvements in your system? Does your AMS team have the expertise to genuinely upskill your team?

Over half the AMS hours you’re paying for may be non-value-add or administrative. This means the actual hourly cost of your AMS could be more than double what you think.

Consider time spent gathering information. It includes seeking approvals, turning reported problems into tasks, hiding personal data in screenshots, reviewing tickets or answering queries from your provider many times, troubleshooting before opening a ticket, and testing for recurring issues. All these activities contribute to hidden costs.

The risk of losing your employee’s trust.

While external data breaches can quickly reduce the trust of your customers, internal security flaws risk damaging the trust of your employees by threatening the privacy of their personal information.

Any enterprise management system will have a wealth of personal information about employees. But in a system like Workday, which combines financial, people and operational data all in one place, there’s even more at risk. In many cases, this will include highly sensitive data that covers everything from employees’ disabilities and gender to their home addresses and bank account details.

If any of this information is seen by colleagues who shouldn’t have access to it – or even worse, leaked outside the organisation – it can be incredibly damaging to your employees’ personal lives and their trust towards your company.

In extreme cases, this could happen because of malicious intentions – a disgruntled employee might look to create damage in the organisation. But often, it’s down to a poor Workday configuration.

The common challenge of data governance in Workday.

Ensuring every part of your Workday setup is airtight is no easy task, but one of the most common faults in security setups we see is poor data governance configuration.

If data governance is poorly configured, people in your organisation might be able to see more types of data than they should or have access to more colleagues’ data in Workday than what’s necessary for their role.

For example, your line managers might need to see the compensation of employees in their team, but they likely won’t need to see their banking details. Similarly, they won’t need access to the data of employees outside their team.

In cases where governance measures fail, it can quickly lead to distrust among colleagues, and between employees and the business. But the consequences can be more than just damaged employee trust.

The UK’s Data Protection Act – and equivalent regulations such as the EU’s Privacy and Electronic Communications Directive – don’t just define data breaches as unauthorised attempts to access organisations’ systems. The term also covers instances where the confidentiality, availability and integrity of data have been compromised.

That means poor data governance within Workday could put you at risk of breaking compliance. And if you get audited, it could be a major issue for your organisation.

But how do these data vulnerabilities occur?

Where you might be creating vulnerabilities in Workday.

Data vulnerabilities can form at any point when using Workday. And it’s often down to the management of security roles.

Security roles in Workday define which people can access which data sets. But after their initial setup, organisations can create more roles whenever they need, which can quickly lead to huge complexity. These roles may be created when people move around within the organisation, or the organisation expands and creates new positions.

Whatever the case, if the person who creates these roles leaves the business, it can be difficult to understand who has access to what. And even if data privacy officers do remain in the business, it’s easy for the number of security roles to grow out of control.

In other instances, vulnerabilities can be created from the moment you implement Workday. If you don’t follow Workday’s philosophy from the very beginning, and instead try to make it work like your legacy system by using additional security rules, managing data governance will only get more difficult.

Also, if you don’t set your security rules up for scalability, you’ll quickly encounter more data governance challenges as your organisation grows and may even be forced to redesign your entire setup.

This is something we often see in acquisitions. When the acquired company isn’t properly consolidated into the organisation, data governance gaps are easily created. This might be because the acquisition follows the security rules of the company being acquired rather than the parent company, which might include different job profiles, role privileges and compensation grades.

Get in touch to discuss your Workday setup

Your Workday security model will be determined by the structure of your organisation. A large organisation will likely require you to make additional exceptions to Workday’s security roles, which will add to the complexity.

However, regardless of your size, you should configure your security in a way that allows for global design, scalability, and flexibility. You should also regularly review your data governance setups if you make significant changes.

As a Workday partner, we have experience helping organisations optimise their Workday setups to ensure they’re protecting their people and their operations, and remaining compliant.

Get in touch today if you have any concerns about your Workday security setup, and see how we can help.