How Will the Workday and Salesforce Partnership Impact Higher Education? 

In an era where data and AI are being leveraged to drive innovation in various industries, the recent partnership between Salesforce and Workday marks a significant development. Let’s explore the impact of this partnership on higher education institutions.

The new collaboration aims to integrate Salesforce’s CRM and Workday’s comprehensive financial and human capital solutions suite. The partnership promises to enhance administrative efficiency, streamline services, and provide deeper insights by leveraging an AI-powered Employee Service Agent and advanced data integration capabilities. Here is what we know as the higher education sector navigates these innovations based on public communications and information provided by Workday.  

First, The Data Problem

As we’ve been saying for a long time, “platform matters” in enterprise systems—meaning that both the functionality and surrounding technology are important. Last week, we published new research comparing the platform capabilities of Ellucian, Oracle, Salesforce, and Workday because institutions need to understand and assess solutions’ data and extensibility capabilities as they examine their functionality capabilities. Higher education institutions can particularly benefit from understanding these platforms’ capabilities to extend beyond delivered functionality and to utilize data effectively in light of the complex nature of our organizations and the missing higher education functionality in many solutions. Consider finance and HCM solutions, where functionality has significantly converged in leading offerings, but the solution platforms’ data management and extensibility capabilities vary widely.

After selecting or implementing SaaS applications, institutions often ask us, “OK, now what about my data?” Institutions must address this question during product evaluation and selection and not treat data considerations as the next step after platform selection.

No modern standard architecture has emerged in our industry to replace the legacy on-premises data warehouse. Institutions have been trying various methods to create a data infrastructure that is consistent, available, inclusive, and performant. The “data mesh” concept (allowing analysis and analytics tools to access a rationalized virtual data warehouse without replicating the data) has been around for a long time. Yet, it is not producing widespread results in higher education, especially across on-premises and SaaS data sources.

Is the Workday and Salesforce Partnership Part of the Solution?

While Workday and Salesforce’s partnership announcement focused on the new AI agent capabilities across the Salesforce and Workday datasets and AI capabilities for employees, the data connection between the platforms may be the biggest story in this partnership. This connection will be brokered using the Salesforce Zero Copy Partner Network, meaning that a secure, persistent, high-capacity, meta-data-enabled connection is being created across Workday and Salesforce platforms. This solves two data-related problems with Salesforce and Workday, respectively.

Salesforce’s Data Cloud operates as a data mesh that accesses Salesforce CRM (and other Salesforce-based application data) and can include third-party data without replication for use in analytics and AI. This is a compelling architecture for existing Salesforce clients with significant user populations already on the platform. However, the missing piece was an easy-to-implement, persistent, near-real-time, performant connection to other application suites, which is crucial for creating a unified data strategy.

Workday has a leading application suite, including finance, HCM, and student solutions for higher education. However, its data is difficult to extract, and it did not have a way to combine it with a broad set of third-party data for analysis. While Workday Prism Analytics offers the ability to bring third-party data into the Workday ecosystem, it isn’t scalable to an enterprise data warehouse and is often cost-prohibitive for institutions.

With this new partnership, shared data foundation, and an enhanced integration with Slack, Workday higher education customers will be able to access a significantly broadened data architecture.  

How Does the Salesforce and Workday Partnership Impact Student Success?

Last week’s announcement focused on an employee-focused AI service agent that will improve productivity and efficiency. HR is indeed a top concern for institutional leaders, given the continued difficulty of hiring and retaining faculty and staff in the post-pandemic era. However, a great employee AI service is not at the top of higher education HR leaders’ wish lists—at least not until more institutions have taken full advantage of the high-end talent and employee experience functionality they already own.

What higher education institutions using these two solutions together could greatly benefit from is a student-focused AI agent and analytics. Workday has noted that while this partnership is currently focused on the AI employee service agent and associated integrations, it will explore how Workday Student may be integrated through the partnership. Tambellini analysts will continue to provide information as it becomes available.  

Could this delay in information and functionality for higher education be a result of Salesforce’s continuing expansion into the student system space? The company has continued with an active, even aggressive build-out of core student functionality—in direct competition with Workday. So, Salesforce is beginning to present an option for Workday customers who have not yet licensed Workday Student.

Though Workday notes an intention for all Workday data to eventually be available via this new data-sharing connection, if Salesforce and Workday’s competing interests in the student space are pushing out functionality for higher education customers, it would be a shortsighted reason to delay using this high-impact partnership to expand the capabilities of both products. Higher education institutions should not have to wait for a competitive balance between these giants; they need solutions that meet their immediate needs, particularly in student engagement and support.

Potential Data Barriers for Institutions

Another significant concern is that Workday requires institutions to share data needed for machine learning (ML) features before granting access to specific ML capabilities. This mandatory data sharing can be a barrier for institutions concerned about data privacy and control. In contrast, Salesforce does not impose such requirements, which could lead to tensions within the partnership as they strive to align their approaches. Data policy differences may impact how effectively the two platforms can integrate and offer cohesive solutions, especially in environments where data sensitivity is paramount. It will be interesting to observe how this dynamic unfolds and whether it influences the adoption of integrated services in higher education.

In Workday’s case, data access issues are a top complaint from higher education customers, so not addressing this right from the get-go is a lost opportunity. We hope the absence of information doesn’t signal another yearlong wait for the new partnership to focus on today’s higher education problems.

Conclusion

The Workday and Salesforce partnership signals significant advancements in higher education data integration and AI capabilities. However, both companies must recognize and address this sector’s unique needs, focusing not only on employee benefits but also on student-centric solutions that enhance learning and support. Institutions should advocate for and actively participate in shaping these innovations to ensure they meet the sector’s diverse needs.

This blog post was updated on 8/2/2024 to incorporate new details and information provided by Workday.