Workday Request Framework: a future home for your HR helpdesk?

The Hidden Depths of Workday Update 29!

Workday are guilty of hiding their light under a bushel on this one. The latest update (29) has the potential to deliver some fantastic new infrastructure features that I haven 't seen much about on Community or in the Workday ecosystem. One such change that has potential to deliver more than it initially seems is what Workday are calling the Request Framework. This uses the Business Process capabilities of Workday to enable support cases to be raised, routed and addressed inside the system. The kind of use cases Workday describe for this functionality are things like a manager asking for a new supervisory organisation to be set up by the Organisation Administrator or a request to the Business Process Administrator to change the threshold on an approval in a BP Definition essentially core Workday config changes. On a presentation (with the usual Safe Harbor caveats), Workday Product Management suggested a use for this feature that was particularly intriguing. It was mentioned that this could in future be used to handle employee grievances. This opens the prospect that Workday are looking to plug a potential functional gap compared with some of their competitors the capability you may think of as the HR Helpdesk. This is a richer, more secure helpdesk solution than a typical IT product like ServiceNow, specifically designed to securely store, display and route highly confidential material such as that relating to bullying, sexual harassment allegations and other employee relations items. Could it be that Workday will gradually enhance this Request Framework to fill this need? We will have to wait and see, but here at Kainos WorkSmart, we certainly see a lot of potential and many future uses for this foundational feature.