A closer look at technical topics

Data and reporting

Workday will become the single source of truth for the University's HR and finance data.

The transformation team is in the process of cleaning a huge amount of data from the systems Workday will replace, and preparing to load it into the platform in time for go-live. On the HR side, this will include employment data from August 2026 onwards; on the finance side, it will include data from current projects, as well as data going back to the 2023 financial year. As HR and finance processes will all run within Workday, the data will automatically update across the platform, so there'll be no need to manually update duplicate data sets.

Workday can generate a range of reports, which align with what various York teams use now. Depending on your role, you'll have access to dashboards related to your area of work, and be able to save the favourites you use most often. We're looking at how to make the most of these dashboards and integrations to make data in Workday as useful as possible.

A lot of historic data won't be moved into the platform. The team will be keeping an archive of it instead, limiting access to a small group of specialist staff who may need it for auditing purposes.

Testing and transitioning

After we've configured our next Workday prototype in the summer of 2026, we'll use the Change Network to invite wider teams to get involved in testing, which will also feed the training offered to everyone in the lead-up to go-live. Throughout that time, more staff will have access to Workday to start getting hands-on experience – and to flag anything that doesn't work as expected.

As we approach winter, there'll be a transition period where we'll run payroll and other processes in Workday and our current systems to make completely sure that the data matches. Go-live will be the starting point for further tests, tweaks and support over the months that follow, making sure we're all adjusting to using Workday in our daily life.

Updates and maintenance

York's new Enterprise Business Platforms (EBP) team, led by David Barrett, will be in charge of maintaining Workday. The platform will get major updates twice a year to keep it at the forefront of global best practice. These will usually be scheduled in the early hours of the weekend to avoid downtime or delays for York staff and their external partners.

After we go live in February 2027, the transformation team will continue exploring how to make use of further Workday features. As an example, we're exploring how to support staff with HR and finance troubleshooting, potentially moving from Zendesk and Salesforce for those areas with Workday's in-house support service to streamline the experience even further.

Customisation and accessibility

You'll be able to customise certain areas of Workday: reorganising your homescreen to show most-used tasks; adjusting your settings for email notifications, and so on.

Workday also comes with built-in options for keyboard control, as well as a range of other accessibility features. As part of the various testing phases throughout the year, we’ll be focusing on these considerations with different audiences, including York's Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Champions, to make sure the platform works well for all users.

This collaboration will also inform how the training can be as accessible as possible, and offered in a mixture of formats for groups with certain learning preferences or additional needs. It builds on the Equality Impact Assessments carried out through earlier stages of the transformation, and those planned when it comes to implementation.