By transitioning from Colleague and Hub to Workday, we have advanced our system decades in the world of software applications. Although all of these systems are capable of managing our operations—registering students, making payments, hiring new employees—modern software applications offer features that the older legacy applications can’t possibly deliver. They provide communication channels, proactive information sharing, internal documentation and assistance, and the ability to design a variety of workflows. Legacy applications often sit passively like lazy lumps—they receive the data that is entered and then wait for someone to do something with them. Modern applications, however, are high achievers, constantly looking for the next thing to be done and getting lots of information out to those that need it.
The Workday Help module gives us the ability to create internal documentation and provide assistance all within the application. Unlike the Hub, you can find and access the support you need to navigate a process without ever having to abandon that process. On most Workday screens you’ll even find the Workday Assistant AI icon (top right corner, looks like a thought bubble) for additional support. Learn how to find and use Workday Help here.
Workday Help also comes with the Workday Case feature, which allows you to contact the Carleton office that supports the process you’re working on if you have questions or need assistance. For example, if you have a question about a budget that you manage, you can open a new Case with the type of “Budget Balances and Reporting” and it will get routed right to our Budget Office. Responses and communications will all be within Workday so they’ll never get lost in your email Inbox.
When you click on the Menu in the upper left corner of Workday, you’ll see a list of apps and dashboards. Some of these are created by Workday, but we are also able to design our own dashboards. If you are an academic advisor, for example, you’ll see the My Advising dashboard, designed and configured by Carleton, which enables you to better track the progress of those that rely on your expert advice. If you are a chair or assistant for an academic department, you’ll see the My Academic Unit dashboard—also designed and configured by Carleton. This dashboard gives departments a tremendous amount of information that has never been available at their fingertips.
The newest tool in our toolbelt is the Workday Journey feature. Since we just started rolling out Journeys, it’s possible that you haven’t experienced one yet. This tool allows us to harness and collate our communication and education during important moments and transitions during your time at Carleton. The Journey guides you step-by-step through a process so that you can understand how that process works and ensure you have completed all necessary steps. Journeys get assigned to people as appropriate, when the time is right, and can consist of internal and external elements. For example, we just released a Journey for our soon-to-graduate seniors. Here are some of the steps along that Journey:
- Instructions to record their name for graduation
- An introduction to the various Alumni resources available to them
- A reminder to return materials to the library
- An introduction to the tasks they’ll need to complete for Student Financial Aid
- And introduction to resources they’ll want to understand in the Business Office
This Journey was a great way to give seniors some basic information and context about their transition from students to alumni, which will help them navigate the many emails that will soon be hitting their Inboxes.
These Workday features are a sample of what we will be able to build out in the coming years as we move from the initial implementation of Workday to building it out and making it a robust tool to streamline college operations.