Creating a Culture of Innovation in City Government and Higher Ed: Workday Rising Speakers Reveal Secrets to Success
Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall realized the need to incorporate new technology throughout Salt Lake City government and in response launched the city's first innovation department in January 2021. The department's goal included implementing an integrated software system to enhance internal functions and support a culture of innovation.
Salt Lake City went live on Workday in August 2022 and is already beginning to see the benefits of modern business processes, a standardized approach to project management, better transparency, and using data to drive decisions. The right planning, processes, and implementation partner helped the city merge its finance and HR management systems from 27 different software systems into one easy-to-use platform. Incorporating change management early in the planning process was a key to the success in supporting employees as the city underwent this historic change.
Miles away in Illinois, Joliet Junior College (JJC), the first community college in the U.S. also sought to streamline its existing financial and human resources systems with Workday. The ERP implementation began in the summer of 2019, and JJC is live on Workday Financial Management and Workday HCM since 2021, enjoying common data structures and business processes, more efficient reporting, and better transparency. In addition to Workday as the primary tool for managing finance, human resources, and payroll data, JJC has embarked on phase two of its project to implement Workday Student to strengthen student engagement and success. Feedback at the college has been positive and there is budding excitement for expanding opportunity for process improvement, reporting, and metrics in Workday.
Salt Lake City CIO Nole Walkingshaw and Joliet Junior College CIO Jim Serr will present on digital transformation at the Workday Rising conference on September 14. Like other organizations in government and higher education, their teams were operating with software from the 90s and 2000s prior to going live on Workday. They'll share their journey from system selection to best practices for enterprise project success and how Workday enabled them to achieve the goal of modernization to better serve citizens, students, the college, and their community at-large.
Avaap is a proud gold sponsor of Workday Rising 2022. If you’ll be at Workday Rising, add the session Digital Transformation with Workday in Higher Ed and the Public Sector [ITLPPS2424] to your conference calendar. If you’re not attending Workday Rising in person this year, you can watch the session virtually or see previous webinars with Joliet Junior College and Salt Lake City’s CIOs.