Unpicking the orthogonal dimensions of organisations

Orthogonal - the characteristic of being independent (relative to something else) The art of implementing Workday HCM at widely differing companies consists in understanding how each organisation sees itself and demonstrating how it can operate and be represented satisfactorily using Workday's delivered functionality. Companies first encounter this process when they go through the Architect phase of the Workday deployment methodology - a rather misleading name because it's really where the organisation and the solution start getting to know one another. And the first topic your partner's Solution Architect will go through with you is Organizations. It's a good place to start, because how you set up the various "dimensions" of your company is fundamental, and usually your existing set-up is wrong. That's a bold statement - but our experience with many different companies bears it out, and here's why it's often the case. Legacy HR applications tend to provide a single structural dimension that is expected to serve the purposes of headcount reporting, cost reporting, workflow routing, project assignments, to name only a few. And faced with this challenge, HR departments have become experts in fusing and fudging the separate, "orthogonal" dimensions of their organization into that one structure, to the point where they begin to forget that there could be another, better way. So when we start talking to new Workday customers about the wealth of independent structures available in Workday HCM, they often struggle to untangle the dimensions that for years they have had to force into a single structure. A classic example of this is when companies have been forced to combine their unique geographical view of their organization^* with their "line of business". They usually flip from line of business to geography or vice versa at a certain level in their structure, and sometimes more than once. Other examples include:

• mixing up where an employee sits with the entity they serve (Customer Support for the South West region versus Customer Support located in the South West region)
• confusing where they sit with what role they play (e.g. an IT support engineer sitting in a Finance function - their role would be reflected by their job profile, independent of their "department")
• failing to distinguish between the employee and the costs of their employment (an employee's costs may need to be allocated to different parts of the business, but they are usually employed by a single legal entity and one a single set of terms and conditions)

But the real value of their people data is unleashed when these dimensions are disentangled, enabling real insight. Conclusion - if you want to get real insight from your HR data, you need to get your organisation structures right (from the start), and if you are moving from a legacy system, that usually means disentangling the independent dimensions and setting them up using the powerful organisations capability of Workday. ^*Companies often have their own organizational geography. This can vary from where they consider the South West region to begin and end, all the way to political expedience such as treating Cuba as part of Europe. The ability to report on where employees sit in that geography is extremely useful and it deserves its own structure, which should be able to differ from the "actual" geography currently recognised by countries and the UN. So Workday allows locations to be grouped into artificial hierarchies as well as still providing the ability to report by "official" geography.