Abraham Maslow’s concept of over-reliance on a familiar tool is something that anyone who works in the software sector is very familiar with. We’ve all met that person who has the same answer to every question, regardless of applicability. In the world of ERP that person is Workday.
When Workday was founded in March 2005 (one month before IntraSee), their focus was on mid-market clients. Twelve years later, Workday treats every client as if they were a mid-market organization, regardless of applicability. And, through clever marketing, and a well-tuned sales demo, they’ve managed to convince many organizations to start thinking of themselves like that. Even when they are not. And that’s the problem of having that one hammer in the toolbox. You’re then forced into convincing the world that they’re all nails.
In the real world, organizations are complex organisms that have evolved over time, and have many important needs that must be met in order for them to flourish. Hence the need for Platform as a Service (PaaS) – cloud based tools that allow sophisticated organizations to move into the Cloud without having to sacrifice the needs of their workforce.
The primary function of HR departments is to assist in the realization of the talents and potential of their organization. Choosing, and implementing properly, the correct Cloud solution, is a key component of that. If Abraham Maslow was alive today, he would be a big proponent of PaaS. And would no doubt term it, “self-actualization in the ERP world”.
At IntraSee we have a roadmap for how to get there, and do it right. It’s called Usability First. Please check out the video below, and let us know if you have any questions.
Editorial note: July 11, 2017 Workday announced:
“Today, we are ready to take a big step forward on our extensibility journey by announcing our intent to open our platform” and is “entering the Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) market”.
The key word here is “intent”. And from a practical perspective the obvious questions are:
- How much of their platform will they open?
- Over what kind of timeframe will this occur?
- How committed to this are they? If they find issues with opening things up, will they then quickly shut it down again?
- Workday has relationships with multiple PaaS vendors. Will this cause a rift with these vendors, and also clients who invested in these platforms?
Time will tell. But clearly it’s far too early to say that Workday has a PaaS platform until we truly see it being used, and, more importantly, being used successfully.
But, as has been said many times. The first step in the path to recovery is to recognize you have a problem. At least Workday is finally owning up to the fact that to be considered a real Enterprise SaaS vendor, you also need to be a real Enterprise PaaS vendor. But the other pillar to be being a true Enterprise player is that you really also need to be a real Enterprise IaaS vendor too. And that’s a very expensive proposition indeed.