Soon, how staff and faculty members enroll in benefits, change an address or view their paychecks will be different, thanks to Workday, a new and easy-to-use human resource management/payroll system that is proposed to go online as early as 2012.

Workday will offer a one-stop-shop user experience for a variety of tasks by "talking" to other Cornell applications. For instance, position information created in Workday will flow into the Taleo system. Once an applicant is hired, the position and personal information related to the new hire will then flow back to the Workday system for use by the department to complete the hiring process.

"The Workday application is Web-based and is designed to provide intuitive, user-friendly self-service at the desktops of faculty and staff members," said Lyman Flahive, director of Human Resource Information Services. "Workday can be integrated with such systems as Kuali, Taleo and other PeopleSoft applications, including the student system, saving users time and improving accuracy."

Employees will go to one page, "All About Me," that will provide a full array of such HR capabilities as:

"In addition, managers and leaders will be able to look at a wide variety of data related to their department, college or unit, including the number of people in their unit, recent hires, recent retirements or transfers," Flahive said. "They will be able to view reports to help make informed decisions," he said. Also readily available will be various standard compliance reports to meet local, state and federal regulations.

Allan Bishop, senior director of Administrative Human Resources and the Recruitment and Employment Center, noted that the hiring process will be streamlined. "Information will be entered once and stored once," he said.

Workday, founded by Dave Duffield '62, MBA '64, and Aneel Bhusri, offers a secure next-generation "Software-as-a-Service," or SaaS, technology. Sometimes referred to as "cloud technology," SaaS is software that is deployed over the Internet and/or runs behind a firewall on a local area network or personal computer. This model will offer a reduced cost of ownership by minimizing the expenses of buying, implementing, upgrading and maintaining large on-premise software applications.

Workday has invited its first two university customers -- Georgetown and Cornell -- to help design functionality for the university setting. "A team of campus representatives will give Workday broad-based input during the design phase," said Flahive. Also involved in the project are a steering committee with representatives from across campus, and executive sponsors Jane Pedersen, associate dean of administration in the College of Arts and Sciences; Paul Streeter, assistant dean for finance and administration at the Vet College; and Mary Opperman, vice president for human resources.

The project timeline is still being examined and is dependent on campus readiness, with consideration of other campus initiatives including Kuali and the approval of the executive sponsors.

For more about Workday at Cornell, see http://www.hr.cornell.edu/wip/index.cfm.