Workday Podcast: How Washington University Evolved Into a Data-Driven Organization

Workday · How Washington University Evolved Into a Data-Driven Organization

Audio also available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Driving technology change can be a harrowing experience, especially at a university with legacy systems older than most of its students-and in one case, older than some of the students' parents.

"We had the same chart of accounts for 50 years," says Jason Burg, assistant vice chancellor for financial information systems at Washington University in St. Louis, which is ranked among the top universities in the U.S. "The software itself was 20 to 25 years old. But with the actual chart of accounts, we had run out of lines."

In this episode of the Workday Podcast, Scott Moyer, product marketing director at Workday, chats with Burg about how Washington University embraced technology to create a data-driven organization with Workday, and its new goal to modernize its students' experience-including retiring and replacing 80 student applications with Workday Student.

Recorded on the Forever Forward bus tour at Workday Rising, Moyer and Burg also discuss trends in higher education, including AI, and share advice on guiding an organization through seismic change.

Here are a few observations Burg shared during the episode, edited for clarity. Be sure to follow us wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts, and remember you can find our entire podcast catalog here.

• "It was like this special language when you started at WashU that people would say: 'We have this zero fund 89 code.' I've got the headset on right now. It sounded like you were speaking to an offensive coordinator calling in a play. And we moved from that to the human-readable value in Workday. Now, that's a gift."
• "We're finding out that we're spending about 3,000 approvals a month on freight exceptions. It's quite a bit, 36,000 a year. And we were starting to question that. Now we went from 3,000 approvals a month down to about 500 average approvals a month."
• "Build the case for change and get everybody aligned at the executive level to understand why we're doing this. And it sounds like a one-time effort, but you'll find yourself bringing that back up, saying, 'Hey, guys, remember, this is why we're doing it. Better data, better processes. We need to do this.'"

Scott Moyer: All right. Well, thanks for joining us on the Workday podcast. We're at Workday rising in Las Vegas at the Forever Forward Bus - my first time, I don't know about you - which has been touring the country to bring Workday's energy and expertise directly to our customers. I'm Scott Moyer, product marketing director at Workday. And with me to my left on the show today is Jason Burg, associate vice chancellor at Washington University in St. Louis, which we are now going to call WashU for the rest of this.

Jason Burg: Yeah, call us WashU.

Moyer: And we're going to talk about all kinds of cool things about Washington University. But let's get started, Jason. And just tell us your story. Where did you come from, how did you get into the Workday practice, and how did you land at WashU? And I know we're both fellow PwC alums, so I want to hear the story of kind of how you came to know Workday and what you're doing there.

Burg: Absolutely. I was at PwC about six and a half years, started in 2013, worked in the business transformation practice, worked on various healthcare payers, providers throughout the United States. As part of that, we did a client introduction over at Washington University in St. Louis. I'm going to call them WashU from now on. But the CFO, Amy Kweskin, remembered that and remembered we came over to talk about some of the tips, tricks, potential pitfalls that you would see, and she remembered that conversation. And when they were doing their own Workday implementation, she, I think, needed a little bit extra firepower. So she brought me on board, and came over to WashU, and haven't looked back since.

Moyer: So what's it like going from being on the consulting side, where you do a project and then you get to leave and go to the next one? Now, you've been there now five years, right?

Burg: Yeah.

Moyer: So kind of compare and contrast that for me. What's it like going from systems integrator to actually owning it?

Burg: It's interesting. So you know that it's a great advantage to know the consulting side because you know internally what they're dealing with. You know their deadlines, how they operate. On the client side, you can do a deeper and better partnership with them. I was aligned to their goals and objectives in a way that I would not have typically understood just coming into it from the client perspective.

Moyer: So let's get into it. You've been there five years. You went live on, let's say, Workday HCM, Financials.

Burg: Yes.

Moyer: Around 2021 timeframe.

Burg: July of 2021.

Moyer: And now, you've recently got on Adaptive, and you're looking in about a week or so to go full bore on Student as well, right?

Burg: Yes, we are looking to get on Workday Student. Kudos to that team, Erin Culbreth, that whole group out there. I don't know the time this podcast is released, but we might be live by then, so we're excited about that. As for the HCM and Financials journey, from the time I arrived at WashU was about an 18-month runway. I think we had to do a little bit of a replanning effort and ultimately move our go-live date out to just become better prepared for what was to come. We did go live, HCM, Financials, payroll, July 1st, 2021, took a brief break for all of six months while we were implementing Adaptive Planning, and went live with that in January of 2022.

Moyer: Okay, so before we get into sort of where you're going next, let's talk about why Workday to begin with. Can you give us some understanding of the process that the team went through? I know you came a little bit later in the project after the decision was made, but what were the goals of the transformation and technology transformation you were doing?

Burg: The goals of the program overall. At WashU, we're trying to evolve into a data-driven organization. We want data to be able to tell the story, and that's everything in the lifecycle, from the way that you collect data to the way you report data and to the way you analyze data. And I feel like Workday's really accelerated our journey on that. First, obviously, all your data is in one place.

Moyer: People, finance data, people and money together.

Burg: Yeah, people and money data all in the same place. I think reporting, a little bit of a challenge to-- you're speaking a new language. You have a new chart of accounts. You're calling things different nomenclature than you would before. So the learning curve, not in the UI of the system, but how people use it, is a little bit different. And then ultimately, you get people on the reports, and you spend your time in the value-added activities of actually analyzing the data. What story is this starting to tell me?

Moyer: I want to hear about some of those stories, but first, I want to double-click on something you said about reporting. Lots of customers tend to try to just recreate all the same reports they had before. Did you rethink that? I don't want to lead the witness here, but did you think with the end in mind about what you really wanted, what the data-- what you really wanted to look like at the end reporting as you started the project, or did you do what lots of folks do and kind of wait till the end?

Burg: No, it was a great question because we have a really great group of researchers, data scientists, report writers, and administration that-- you know what you know. And in the old system, the way that things would work is I would do, essentially, a data dump of a ton of data. I would take that, I would cobble it together, and build my way back up to what I'm trying to see. So think of multiple spreadsheets grouped together, pivot table up, and that's what I'm trying to get at.

So when we really did that double-click into what our users were asking, they're asking for, essentially, large data files, and we're like, "Well, what do you want to do with that?" "Oh, I want to build this." Good start. Let's go just start to build this. And we realized it through the reporting process, and we started to build that actual report. And Workday works a little bit different. You were presented with a screen of your data that you then double-click down into. So it's really the inverse of how they had been working for some period of time. Now, there are special groups of people. We've been able to leverage Workday worksheets for those that really want that Excel-like experience, that like to move columns, create my own.

Moyer: What are some things you were able to do-- we often talk about people and money together. Can you give folks that may not be that familiar with the higher ed industry, if you will, or the group, what are some of the things that you were able to do as a result of people and money in the same place?

Burg: One of the ones that we've recently used, we use Adaptive Planning data, so we plan at the position level. And that position level, if it's a filled position, we know the salary. If it's an open position, we have a default amount that we can bring in, but we bring that up in Workday through Prism into our actuals.

To answer the question, if I have an employee, the job requisition was supposed to be for X, and I hire you for Y, now, I've got a delta there that I've got to kind of think about. So it's really enabled us for the people and money side, for position management, how that marries up against your actual budget. And it's really helped. I think the original request came from our CHRO that wanted insights organization-wide, but we were like, "This is pretty neat." As an operational manager, you could take this and have insights into your cost centers to know, on the people basis, where am I overspending, underspending on the positions?

Moyer: And I guess, from a finance perspective, it's more of the driver's side, right? Because yeah, I know the positions drive the cost and the salaries and benefits and everything that comes with it. So if I can focus on where am I off versus budget in my positions, it's going to tell me everything I need to know about why my costs are off, right?

Burg: Yeah, absolutely. It gives you that granular level to, if you just keep asking the question, "Why?" you're going to get to that point. "Well, my compensation is high. Why? Okay, let me take a look at my salaries line. Okay. Why? Oh, I'm actually [on?] a budget for 10 people. I had to ramp up. I've got 12 right now." I can clearly see that [crosstalk]--

Moyer: You know your consulting blood is coming out, right? I can hear--

Burg: It is? [laughter]

Moyer: --the five whys. Did you learn that in consulting like everybody else?

Burg: I did.

Moyer: Ask the question five times till you get to the actual [crosstalk].

Burg: I did. It's a great question.

Moyer: And you also said something about Prism. Tell us a little bit more about what you're using Prism to do. Because for those who don't know, Prism is a tool to bring data outside of Workday into the Workday environment where you can do all this rich analysis you were talking about. Many people use it to bring in things like external data or source systems, revenue expense systems that are legacy systems that you don't want to retire yet. What were you guys using Prism to accomplish?

Burg: Our first Prism use case. You got me thinking about this one. Business process transactions. We wanted more insight. This is a story for you, but we have-- that time of year, we're on a fiscal calendar July to June. So in the finance world around May, everybody starts-- the anxiety starts going up, like, "The close is coming. The close is coming." And we needed insights. "Everybody close your transactions." But everybody's like, "Okay, just mass close. Let's close everything," but through Prism-- we have an excellent reporting team led by Dustin Card, who came up with business process transactions through Prism that we can index some of the data value. So you, as a supervisory manager, you can look at your team. You can see the open transactions by person, by transaction type. So you can see that Sally's got this amount of invoices, that Susie's got this amount of expense reports that are open. And then we reverse-sort based on some age duration categories. But you can really see who has what work to be able to-- a much more targeted fashion to be able to get through that.

Moyer: And you're using Prism to get that data in?

Burg: We are. We started with Workday. We were able to really optimize it, and the team was really able to optimize it through indexing some of it through Prism dataset because you're marrying up some of the cost center data with some of the supervisory organization data.

Moyer: Because you want to see it that way. You want to see it by organization, by person, transaction, and marry the two together.

Burg: Absolutely.

Moyer: You mentioned a little bit about some of the differences in Workday. Right? Any new software you implement is going to be different, and especially if you have legacy systems people are used to using. They've done it for 20 or 30 years in some cases. What was different about Workday from a change management perspective? How did you have to leverage your change management skills from PwC days to really drive that transformation?

Burg: I'll give you two answers on that one. The first one, from the purely finance side, we had had the same chart of accounts for 50 years. So, I mean, substantial amount of time in system.

Moyer: I was lowballing by saying 20 or 30. [laughter] You're saying it's 50 years.

Burg: Yeah. Well, the software, I think, was 20 to 25. The actual chart of accounts, we had ran out of lines.

Moyer: Wow.

Burg: And so it was like this special language when you started at WashU that people would talk, like, "We have this zero fund 89 code." I've got the headset on right now. It sounded like you were speaking to an offensive coordinator calling in a play. And we moved from that to the human-readable value.

Moyer: Omaha. Omaha. [laughter]

Burg: Yeah, exactly. We moved from that into the human-readable values in Workday, that you had a fun number. Now, that's a gift. Now, you had a different phone number. That's a grant.

Moyer: So a new language, basically.

Burg: Yeah, it was essentially a new language, but it was calling it what it really is in terms of the grant/gift project, some of our [driver?] work tags. It was a nice change that you could actually have a coding structure that matched what we were actually doing. So step one, that was a great step forward. I think for your other question, in terms of just change management and what we did, we got such a diverse population of people that use Workday at different levels. So it was about meeting people where they are. So if you're, essentially, a staff member that you need to clock in, you need to clock out, you need to look at my W-2, I need to see my paycheck every here and there, and I need to request time off, there's a basic training package and communication package that went out to that audience.

Moyer: Also persona-based package.

Burg: We did do persona-based packages and actually have evolved into some persona-based reporting that we can maybe catch in a little bit, but we have that base level. You also have somebody that's within research, and they have a completely different user experience. They're in the system substantially more than what that basic user set would be. You run a lab. You want to know, "Out of all my stuff, whether I have a project, a gift, a grant, what's my balance, and when am I going to run out of money?" And we've tailored some reporting to take care of that population specifically.

Moyer: Interesting, because you're also in the healthcare business at WashU, right?

Burg: Yeah, absolutely.

Moyer: So you have some background in healthcare. So how did you leverage that background when you came on board with WashU?

Burg: Yeah, I felt like you get into WashU, and it's so large, that you have your classical academic campus, then you have this gigantic medical center with the School of Medicine that-- it's just so vast in the services that they provide. But I started my career at the hospital side of the same complex. I was born there. I've gotten to see it grow over the years. So I kind of joined-- like joining an old team, coming over. I was, albeit, on the healthcare provider side before, but joining over had massive respect for the School of Medicine, both in the St. Louis market and nationally. So I think it came from a place of just very much respect for that crew.

Moyer: You had told me a story about a new CFO being onboarded and how easy it was with Workday. Can you tell our listeners a little bit more about how you approached that, and what was the CFO's perspective? I'm a former CFO myself, so I'm always curious to see how they walked in and saw it, and just tell us that story.

Burg: We had spent quite a bit of time developing that chief financial officer dashboard. Our chief financial officer retiring at WashU - her name's Amy Kweskin - we spent so much time building that particular view and our persona-based reporting strategy, that, "You're the CFO. This is your suite that we want you to look at." We spent a lot of time going through that. Understanding as well, in Workday the transactions, how they hit, how they're classified, how you do journals has an impact on that dashboard. So we would use that. We get the whole finance team together. We run it after the month close, and we take a look. We try to understand if there's any anomalies there in the data. What's our trend? How are we doing at this time last year? Are we up? Are we down? Can we explain why?

So we spent a lot of time getting that thing together. And recently, with Amy's retirement, we don't know how long the new search will be. So we have an interim director, David Gray, came over. Former Penn State CFO. Nice guy. I got to meet him, and he was like, "Tell me about Workday." So we pulled up. He very easily bookmarked the dashboard. So we started through like, "This is your, basically, income statement. This is, year over year, how we kind of pared out against last year. We take the same view. We cut it sideways, that you can look across our business units to understand how our Danforth campus is performing against our medical school campus. You can drill back in. You can look at the individual schools, how their performance is year over year." We have a separate section for the reserves, which has been a hot topic at WashU lately, that we want to know and understand some more insights into the school's reserve balances, particularly their unrestricted reserves and how we are essentially committing funds to the future.

Moyer: So if you think about the grant process, where it's on almost an annual basis - you're granted the money and it runs out - are reserves something that allow you to carry that forward into the future?

Burg: Yeah, reserves, you think about that as just a balance sheet item, that you're going to be able to carry that forward year over year, that you can use as a school at WashU for your strategic investments.

Moyer: Gotcha. And you mentioned transactions, too. You were also telling me a story earlier about how you use Workday to look at-- I don't want to get the words wrong, but postage, or was it packaging, shipping costs?

Burg: Freight.

Moyer: Freight.

Burg: Freight.

Moyer: I was close. I was in the ballpark.

Burg: You were right on it with freight. I think the strength of WashU and how we utilize Workday is our user groups. We have several user groups that give us insights, not only into the priority of what we're working on, but they really closed the feedback loop for us. And one of the things that one of our heads over at the School of Medicine had noticed, they're spending all this time on freight charges. So we're like, "This is interesting. Let's take a look." We're finding out that we're spending about 3,000 approvals a month on freight exceptions.

Moyer: 3,000 approvals?

Burg: Yeah, 3,000 approvals. It's quite a bit. 36,000 a year. And we were starting to question that-- within our config, we're like, "Are we being too granular with this?" And we, as a group, brought it out. They agreed. So we put in a configuration change that we're waiving a 10% variance, give or take, on any shipping that's under 100 bucks. Right?

Moyer: What were you able to-- what results did you get from doing that?

Burg: We went from 3,000 approvals a month down-- we're averaging about 500 approvals a month.

Moyer: Oh, wow.

Burg: Yeah, it was a substantial change, but it was-- it's cool. I wish I can show you guys, or maybe I can do something later that you can see a graphic that we're looking at this month over month, and you see 3,300, 2,800, 3,000, 500, 450, 500, 400. Just a precipitous fall.

Moyer: That's got to be great for motivation, people that have to track that stuff, right?

Burg: Yeah. It's your user community coming to you guys to solve a problem. And we're able to work closely with our team, make these configuration changes, and then show them in the data from Workday, "Hey, this is the impact, and you don't have those clicks anymore. If they're not value-add, let's not do them."

Moyer: I want to now jump back to Adaptive, and then I want to move forward into the future, what you're going to do with us. But Adaptive is your most recent kind of win, if you will. What are you able to do with Adaptive that you weren't before?

Burg: We started as part of the original scope that we were going with. Adaptive was, first, a system replacement. We had a budgeting system. We needed a new budgeting system. And we put in Adaptive for operational budgeting, so how we do fiscal year operational management. We then went into a, "Well, wouldn't it be better if," type year that we made a lot of enhancements to that platform. We've then moved and stood up a second instance of Adaptive that we use for strategic planning. So it's at a higher level. It's not your operational budget, not at your cost center level.

Moyer: Multiple years?

Burg: Yeah, multiple years. So we're looking right now at a three-year time horizon. That's where we are right now. We've piloted it last year with our School of Medicine who-- absolutely fantastic job, that team, in particular, our School of Medicine, did with that. And have now looking to go this next fall-- not 2024, but in 2025, we're going to have the rest of the campus enter into that three-year planning type view. We can then take that, and probably stepping into your next question, "What's coming next for WashU?" we're going to take that three-year plan, and we have our administrative leaders over at the School of Medicine, our administrative leaders within our Danforth Campus and our Central Fiscal Unit. They're going to use some drivers, and we're going to extrapolate out years 4 to 10.

Ultimate goal, we're going to have a 10-year financial view of the university that takes into account our 10-year university financial plan. Now, we do have-- we didn't put together a university plan without knowing all the costs associated with it, but Adaptive is going to act as that aggregation mechanism to put all the knowns together with all the things that you're trying to do. And you're able to see out on that 10-year time horizon, and really, you're empowering the CFO's office to be able to understand, based on new scenarios, how is that going to impact the university? And you can know it just at the time you enter it.

Moyer: So Workday, Adaptive Planning, HCM, Financials, Prism so far. Now, we're turning the page. In a week from now, you're going to go live on Student. Tell me about the motivation behind that and some of the expected results you intend to get from Student. You can start with the number of systems you are going to replace. That would be a good one.

Burg: Yeah. It's impressive. I think we will be sunsetting around 80 systems or 80 particular different applications just with Workday Student. When we did the administrative systems replacement project, our student systems needed to be replaced. Probably the worst out of everything that was in our existing legacy suite. But with Workday, what we opted to do as an institution is HCM, Finance first, and then have Student roll onto the platform. The Student team is done. We've been three years into the journey - I think I mentioned it earlier - Erin Culbreth leading that particular initiative. They're doing an excellent job. I'm very excited for where they're going to end up. And yeah, I don't know when this thing will post, but we'll probably be live at that time, so advanced congratulations to that team.

Moyer: Very good. We'll have to have you back on another podcast to see some of the results from that. But 80 systems is a pretty darn good result.

Burg: Oh, it is. It is. And I think, to kind of backtrack to what your original question was, one of the things that's been very fascinating about Workday is how students use the system versus how your administrative user uses it. So with the HCM and Finance modules, we're-- I'm pointing at my laptop for those that can't see us, but you're going to use this laptop. You do a lot of your-- any type of work through, basically, this type of interface. But Workday Student, the students, they use iPhones, they use Androids, and the Workday UI interface for how a student interacts in the system. And we're pretty heavy Workday mobile users. I don't know relative to the higher ed industry. We're about 9,000 logins a month, which I'd like to think is pretty substantial. But just how that UI [crosstalk].

Moyer: That's impressive. And your point, I always use the statistic-- I have to update it every year, but kids graduating college today were about three or four years old when the iPhone first came out. Because I think it was 2007, right? 17 years ago. Yeah, they were kids. They don't know a world without having access to all their information at their fingertips. And the punchline is you think they want to come work for a company that's got green-screen technology, right? What are your expectations around the student population and how they're going to react to having much better interfaces and much better systems?

Burg: From what we can tell, they're very excited about the prospect of being able to do their registration and everything from their phone or just within their laptop. I'm excited for, in particular, that team and the amount of change that's gone into that, and what that team has been able to provide has been phenomenal for the university. I know we'll be live, essentially the first phase, a smaller go-live this September, big one coming up in this next February. So we'll have all eyes on WashU for the next kind of rolling 12 months.

Moyer: And we touched on change management a bit, but if you are a listener right now and you haven't embarked with Workday yet, what advice would you give someone-- now looking back over a three-to-five-year journey with PwC included, what would you tell someone who's in the higher ed market who's thinking about Workday? What would you tell them about what to expect and what to look out for, lessons learned, if you will, kind of having gone through the change? Because I know you guys had some starts and restarts. You had to rethink things at the beginning. But would you go down the path of the persona-based reporting? Or what were some things you learned unexpectedly in the process that you would tell someone, "Okay, this is something you need to focus on in your change management"?

Burg: I'm putting on the consulting hat first. I was thinking about that in terms [crosstalk]--

Moyer: Once a consultant, always a consultant.

Burg: I know. When you're first doing it, I think the case for change and getting everybody aligned at the executive level to understand why we're doing this. And it sounds like a one-time effort, but you'll find yourself bringing that back up, say, "Hey, guys, remember, this is why we're doing it. Better data, better processes. We need to do this." And keeping everybody aligned at the highest level, I think, first. As for the particulars of what you learned, I worked at PwC. We took a lot of clients live. And you stay for that post-production support, the hyper-care period, and then you kind of go on to the next thing. What's been unique about the journey for WashU, being able to stay in a operational capacity to really partner with the business, to understand really what they're dealing with, and then have Workday be the solution to that problem each time that they're facing it, that part's been absolutely fascinating, and I do really enjoy that aspect of the job.

For the audience that hasn't been there yet and you're going to embark on the journey, I think, first starts with your data. I think if you're going to really want to maximize the analytics capacity of Workday, whatever data you're going to convert into Workday needs to be very clean. So not in terms of, "Can I load this?" but, "Is what I'm loading a very accurate depiction of what is happening?" So that nice data cleanup exercise to make sure that you're starting on day one with a nice clean cut of whatever you will be converting to use.

Moyer: I think that's a great segue into AI because large language models, right, if you train them on-- if the data is clean, you're going to get much better results. We see a lot of these hallucinations because people use the World Wide Web, and no surprise, it comes up with some noise. Are you excited about the prospects of AI, and are you thinking of what stories you might be able to tell that you can't tell today because your data will be cleaner in one place, etc., etc.? Or have you already found some stories you're telling with data that you weren't able to? I'd like to kind of get into the story side a bit.

Burg: We've deployed not in the generation capacity, but in the machine learning capacity, using Workday for journal insights, spend anomaly detection, and expense anomaly detection. Our internal audit's getting a demo - by the time this airs, they will have seen it - on the spend anomaly detection. I'm very excited to see--

Moyer: They're going to like that.

Burg: Yeah, it is fascinating the way that that particular module works and how you can analyze those expenses. It's pretty cool stuff. I'm trying to recall where I was going with that one.

Moyer: Well, the question is, either already or in the future, what are some stories you're going to be able to tell in the higher ed space that you weren't able to because your data wasn't in Workday in one place, accessible, etc.? Are there some stories that the business can now tell? You said you have some data scientists, so I expect that there's some storytellers in there as well using the data to tell the story of WashU.

Burg: I think where we would like to evolve to, especially talking the Adaptive platform, is, understanding the last run rates of the few years, can you extrapolate out and just kind of tell us, if the past remained, what would the future look like, and be able to use it in that particular capacity. But I do think the ability to get into data mining and what it can bring out is absolutely fascinating. We're just on the very tip of the frontier on how this is going to look, so it's--

Moyer: Well, back to your Adaptive thing, as I think about what is the future market for students, you probably have data out there, outside of your four walls, that can help you predict what the next year's class is going to be, right? You can look at-- if it's SAT scores or demographics in the area, there's probably lots of data sources you guys might think about to do your forward-looking forecasting because I would assume the number of students drives a lot of your plan, right?

Burg: Yeah. The number of students will drive the tuition that we can then allocate out to the school, so we're keen on what that student demographic is going to represent.

Moyer: Outstanding. Anything else you would want to tell someone who's looking at Workday, or thinking about it, about your journey at WashU? This has been fantastic. We'll close here in a sec, but I want to give you just a chance-- open-ended question: anything else you want to share with our audience?

Burg: I don't want to sound too cliché on it, but really, your implementation cycle really is a journey. Whether you're doing it for 18 months, 2 years, 3 years, it's a particular grind, but there is-- within the Workday process, for how you implement, you iterate and you learn. And just for me, getting to WashU, just understanding how that business operates, how it's reflected in our business processes, are we making things easier? If not, let's make things easier. And I'm really just enjoying that particular journey. I find the challenge absolutely fascinating. But that part of the journey has always really stuck out to me. I enjoy doing the challenging things.

Moyer: Well, bringing that whole theme, right, people and money together, what I like about your story, Jason, is you talk about the personal impact and being able to see, down to a user level, the joy that's coming from having better technology. As a consultant, we didn't often see that. We saw all the spreadsheets and all the things in the background and the project management and the cost and the overruns and getting the right people on the project. That was all part of the deal, but to actually see the impact on a real human being and to see their eyes light up when they go, "I can see that now." Like your CFO story, I'm sure he was very impressed with that dashboard that was already created when he got there. I know I would have been too.

Burg: No, I'd like to think so. One of the cool things that we watched happen, particularly within our user groups, the user presents a problem. Everybody agrees this is a problem that needs to be solved. That particular user partners with our Workday support team and is able to figure out a solution to the problem. And then the cool part is the user comes back to the user group to describe the solution, does the demonstration, "This is how it's going to work."

Moyer: Oh, wow.

Burg: And we feel like we get a next-level buy-in when you have a user group that's that engaged. And they're presenting to their peers, and we're just enabling the technology and the business transformation change to happen. But they're owning it, and they're driving it. And it's amazing to see from where I sit. And just watching WashU as an institution taking ownership of their Workday and being able to really be the ones driving and prioritizing that change and then showing it off, doing the demonstration, this is why this is going to be better for us.

Moyer: Talk about change management and accelerating it, getting the users to actually do the demos to the other users, that's a great idea.

Burg: Yeah. And it's been unique about WashU. It has this ability to self-organize itself and bring you into the fold, "Hey, this is the problem we're trying to solve. Be part of the solution with us." And we really partner at multiple levels within the institution. And really being able to drive that change has been a special part about WashU, and how they do self-organizing, it's been fascinating.

Moyer: Well, we've been talking with Jason Burg from Washington University in St. Louis, AKA WashU. Thanks for tuning in with us today. Remember to follow us wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. And remember, you can find our entire catalog at workday.com/podcasts. I'm your host, Scott Moyer, and I hope you all have a great workday. Jason, thank you so much for sitting with us. This has been a great conversation.

Burg: Absolutely. Thank you, Scott. It's been great.

Moyer: Appreciate it.