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What factors into a successful HRIT team?

What factors into a successful HRIT team?

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Overview

Moving your organization to the cloud—and more specifically, SAP SuccessFactors—is a major investment, both in time and money. Your business expects a certain return on this investment, which HR is eager to deliver. Going live is only the first step towards delivering on that promise. Maintaining, nurturing and developing your organization’s SAP SuccessFactors functionality and services ongoing is what will maximize the value of your investment.


The majority of our clients tell us SAP SuccessFactors is owned by the HR organization and supported by IT. Indeed, those companies that achieve the greatest success with SAP SuccessFactors are those that adopt a collaborative approach incorporating teams from across HR, IT and finance.

Take a moment to answer the following questions to help determine how best to arrange this collaborative effort:
  • How is each of these teams structured?
  • What are the unique subject areas within the support team?
  • What are the typical responsibilities/ activities across each tier of support involving the HRIT team?
  • What is the average size of the HRIT team and ratio of members to overall employees?
  • What are the main activities that traditional IT team members are involved in?
This paper takes a closer look at the characteristics of these teams and the role traditional IT can play. We also share our recommendations of how best to staff these teams based on our 15 years of experience as an SAP SuccessFactors partner serving more than one million employees across the globe.

What does a successful deployment look like?

Establishing measurable success criteria

User adoption

  • Adoption rate based on completed process transactions by module
  • Greater self sufficiency across ESS and MSS
  • Increased direct accountability by managers for employee life cycle events
  • Reduced demand for navigational support

Enhanced services

  • Unified and consistent business processing
  • HR transition from operational to strategic partner
  • Full view Talent Management solution unified with HR and reward
  • Finance efficiencies on reporting and audit

Economies

  • Reduction in certain transactional volumes, leading to redeployment opportunity or redundancy of roles
  • Decommission legacy systems and processes
  • Reduced disparate application license and architecture costs
  • ROI target and value realization assessment

Insights

  • Fully integrated reporting capability across HCM and financials suites
  • Intuitive UI and easy to adopt
  • Embedded analytics within BP transactions
  • Management Scorecard with top five people KPIs
  • Forecasting and planning capability proven

Compliance

  • Ability to readily furnish data required for audit checks
  • Fully transactional footprint and history of application change
  • Response time to regulatory and compliance requirements

Governance

  • Increased feature adoption rate
  • Local vs. global change assessment and authority
  • Collaborative effort across full tier support model engaging IT, HR and finance

How the best Workday customers work

In late 2016, the Workday Value Index Study took a close look at how users get the most value out of their investment. More than 50 global customers participated in the survey, sharing insights from companies ranging in size from 500 to 90,000 employees. These organizations were at varying stages in their Workday journey.

Performance and value was measured across the following dimensions:

  • Function strategy
  • Service delivery model
  • Talent management capabilities
  • Technology landscape
  • Business process complexity
  • Data integrity and analytics

Key findings: Higher-performing Workday customers have a number of things in common:

  • Laser focus on strategy (e.g. their Workday HRIT team spends 24 percent more time on strategic initiatives.)
  • Greater investment and innovation (e.g. they utilize more product functionality and enable/deploy new features each quarter.)
  • Rigorous use of analytics (e.g. top performers create 2.4 times as many reports per 1,000 employees.)
  • Dedication to data integrity (e.g. by having efficient operational support in place)
  • Direct access (e.g. over half of the high performers have greater than 75 percent utilization of direct access for managers, compared to 20 percent for the others.)

Interestingly, the study also found that customers ranked the improvement and alignment of HR Service Delivery (set up and operation) as a pivotal factor for delivering impactful services to their businesses.

Clearly, there is a direct correlation between the readiness and capability of the customer’s support organization and higher performance levels and better value realization. But what do these organizations actually do and how are they structured?

The Workday support model: Collaborate and succeed

Those organizations that achieve success typically adopt a collaborative approach, engaging teams of experts from HR, IT and finance to deliver and support their services.

Day-to-day interactions 

Human resources

  • BP configuration and support
  • HR data set maintenance—orgs hierarchies, positions, plans
  • Security validation
  • Report writing
  • Update management (NSCs)

Information technology

  • Integration support and troubleshooting
  • EIB and web services/data hub management
  • Access support—PGP, SFTP
  • 3rd party vendor management

Finance

  • Finance configurations
  • Finance data sets—companies, cost codes, suppliers
  • Forecasting and cost management
  • Regulation and change

HRIT team structures and responsibilities

With concentration on the HR/HCM side of things, we’re often asked about the typical ratio and structure (roles and responsibilities) of the client HRIT organization. This is not easy to answer, however, based on an ongoing study of our own client base in Europe, we have a good idea that the following is fairly reflective of how Workday is managed across the globe.

How are teams structured and what are their unique subject areas?

Most of our clients use a hybrid centralized/shared service approach to supporting Workday. This usually entails a global (central) center of excellence with distributed Tier 1 and subject matter experts, depending on the regional or international spread. This central COE team (known as HRIT) is split into functional and technical responsibilities:

Functional

  • Core data maintenance
  • BP admin
  • Change analyst
  • Security admin
  • Comp and absence plan

Technical

  • Integration maintenance
  • EIB processing
  • Report writing
  • Auditing
  • Data warehouse
Tier 1: Customer service Tier 2: Administration Tier 3: App maintenance
Navigational “How do I?” requests COE—Escalation point for Tier 1 request Escalation point for Tier 2 requests
Data content management Named support contacts—Raise cases to Workday customer care Develops complex calculated fields
Position and org maintenance Troubleshoot integration issues Builds advanced custom reports
Cost center maintenance Configuration and security maintenance New integration builds, mapping, and XSLT changes
Absence and comp plan query support Custom report writing Break-fix support for integration issues
End-user data support Workday updates—Assess and validate new releases Security change request assessment and configuration
Process monitoring Absence, comp and benefit plan maintenance Tenant configuration—new build of all comp, absence and benefits plans
Data gathering for batch load Define requirements for bigger impact change items Research complex issues / new enhancements
Resolving BP transactional issues EIB batch data processing (e.g. mass load of changes) Engage with Workday customer care on troubleshooting defects

What is the average size of an HRIT team and the ratio of members to employees?

HR x 2.5, IT x 1.5, 7,000 org—average ratio of HRIT FTE to employee count

What do traditional IT members do?

There are typically 3 main disciplines on the Workday BAU and change agenda for IT:

Triage and change

  • Establishes customer help desk and systems
  • Acts as first line triage and distribution of requests
  • Owns integration monitoring/ troubleshooting
  • Builds complex reports and EIB handling and letter-building
  • Does not typically act as named support contact with Workday
  • Assists with integration testing for new Workday releases
  • Provides project management expertise

Account management

  • Handles issues relating to system access, desktop / browser
  • Performs account maintenance—AD, OKTA integration owner
  • Does not own J.M.L process, but owns downstream systems and related integrations
  • Owns relationship with Workday CSMS and sales
  • Owns relationship with partner service providers
  • Owns data hub integrations

Compliance and risk

  • Conducts regular audits of security and access controls
  • Sets standards for HR change and release procedures
  • Owns firewall, IP whitelisting, SSO/ PGP keys and SFTP configurations
  • Owns ISO, SOCs and other compliance standards
  • Maintains integration security controls

What’s the takeaway?

  • Most clients report that Workday is owned by their HR organization and supported by IT. This aligns with trends across the wider Workday ecosystem.
  • When it comes to global change governance, there tends to be a joint venture between IT and HR. To date, the exposure and involvement of finance teams has been limited, but is expected to increase as more clients in Europe deploy Expenses, Workforce Planning, Projects and core Financials modules.
  • Almost all companies dedicate resources to the maintenance and development of their Workday system.
  • IT is often brought in for more complex aspects, such as integration maintenance, account provisioning and EIB/web services.
  • Our clients widely believe IT should be more involved in Phase 1 implementation delivery from a project governance and product knowledge perspective. However, few clients used Workday core training for their IT resources.
  • IT and procurement typically own the vendor relations side of things and become more involved when there is dissatisfaction with service.
  • Organizations working within a regulated environment (e.g. with ISO standards) typically tend to have more formal IT controls and governance in place.
Interested in continuing the conversation?
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