WORKDAY IN HIGHER EDUCATION: WHAT REAL IMPLEMENTATIONS TEACH US

ERP · Workday · Higher Education · Digital Transformation · Implementation

If you’ve attended any higher education technology conference in the past several years, you’ve heard the word “Workday” spoken with equal parts optimism and anxiety. For institutions that have spent decades managing finances, HR, payroll, and student records on aging platforms like Banner or PeopleSoft, Workday represents a genuine leap forward — a cloud-native, unified system built for how modern organizations actually operate. But “going live” and “successfully transforming” are two very different things, and the gap between them has become one of the defining challenges in higher education technology. What real implementations reveal is that the technology is rarely the hard part. The hard part is almost always everything else.

Why So Many Institutions Are Moving to Workday

The case for Workday in higher education isn’t difficult to make. Legacy ERP systems, even when maintained and patched, often require users to navigate multiple disconnected interfaces to complete a single workflow. An HR transaction might touch one system, a payroll adjustment another, and a budget transfer a third. That kind of fragmentation is expensive to maintain, frustrating for staff, and increasingly difficult to secure. Workday’s promise is a single platform — financials, human capital management, and, with Workday Student, student information — that shares a common data model and a common interface. When institutions ask why they’re going through a multi-year, multi-million-dollar transformation, the answer usually traces back to this: maintaining the old environment is costing them more, in staff time, consultant fees, and institutional agility, than making the move (EDUCAUSE, 2023).

The Lesson from Grand Valley State University

Grand Valley State University in Michigan is one of the more instructive recent examples. When Ben Rapin, the university’s Associate Vice President for IT and CTO, described GVSU’s journey from Banner to Workday Finance and HR/Payroll, one of his first points was that the project team had to consciously fight the instinct to treat it as an IT project. “We knew we couldn’t go it alone,” he noted. “It was important to establish early on that this was not an IT project, but a huge campus initiative that would involve the work of teams across the University.” The institution assembled a cross-functional steering structure, brought in a dedicated change management professional before the implementation partner had even been selected, and built a “change agent network” of champions embedded in departments across campus (Murphy et al., 2023). That last piece — people in every corner of the institution who understood what was coming and could communicate it to their colleagues — turned out to be one of the most valuable things GVSU did.

Rapin also made a candid admission that should give other institutions pause: three months after deciding on Workday, GVSU selected an implementation partner. In hindsight, he said, three months wasn’t nearly enough time to make that decision well. Implementation partner selection shapes everything from timeline to methodology to post-go-live support, and rushing it — even under pressure from a vendor or a self-imposed project schedule — creates downstream problems that are hard and expensive to fix. That warning has appeared in institution after institution’s post-implementation retrospective, and it’s worth taking seriously.

Change Management Is the Actual Project

Research consistently backs up what experienced practitioners already know: projects with strong change management are significantly more likely to hit their goals than those where change management was underfunded or treated as an afterthought. The real culprits behind most Workday implementation struggles aren’t bugs in the software or integration failures, though those happen too. They’re leadership gaps, unclear ownership of business processes, inadequate training, and organizations that tried to map old workflows onto a system that was designed around different assumptions. Workday is opinionated software — it reflects best practices baked in by design — and institutions that try to replicate their legacy processes exactly inside it often end up with the worst of both worlds: a modern platform configured to behave like an old one, with all the rigidity and none of the efficiency gains (Whatfix, 2025).

At Westmoreland County Community College, President Dr. Tuesday Stanley described a deliberate effort to redesign processes before the institution even selected a new ERP. They documented what they wanted to become — their “future state” — and began implementing new ways of working ahead of any technology change. That sequencing, process reimagination before system selection, is something CampusWorks CEO Liz Murphy highlighted as one of the clearest differentiators between implementations that achieve lasting transformation and those that merely achieve a go-live date (Murphy et al., 2023). The go-live, as Dr. Stanley put it, is not the win. The win is what the institution looks like two or three years later.

Data Migration: The Most Underestimated Risk

Ask anyone who has been through a major ERP migration what kept them up at night, and the answer is almost always data. Workday needs clean, complete, well-structured data to function as designed. What most institutions discover when they begin extracting data from legacy systems is that they have decades of inconsistencies — duplicate records, fields used for purposes they were never intended for, data that was never validated because no one needed to report on it directly. Cleaning and transforming that data takes longer than almost any institution plans for, and inaccurate data going into Workday produces deeply painful outcomes: incorrect paychecks, broken approval workflows, reports that don’t match reality. The institutions that do this well start their data audit early — not as a pre-go-live checkbox, but as a foundational phase of the project — and they run multiple validation cycles before anything touches the production environment.

What Success Actually Looks Like

Across the implementations that have gone well — Brandeis University, Kansas City University of Medicine and Biosciences, Smith College with Workday Student — a few patterns hold. Senior leadership was visibly involved and communicated frequently, not just at kickoff. The institution committed real resources: a full-time project manager, dedicated business analysts for each major functional area, and a change management professional present from the earliest stages. Training wasn’t a one-time event at the end of the project but an ongoing investment, including hands-on sessions after go-live when people had actual questions about real tasks they were trying to complete. And perhaps most importantly, the project teams treated the go-live as the beginning of a transformation, not the end of one.

Beidat LLC partners with colleges and universities on ERP implementation planning, change management strategy, and the institutional readiness work that determines whether a Workday deployment actually delivers on its promise. If your institution is preparing for a major system transition — or trying to recover from one that didn’t go as planned — reach out to the team at support@beidat.com or call 888.384.1992.

References

EDUCAUSE. (2023). More than “going live”: Achieving institutional transformation through ERP implementation. EDUCAUSE. https://library.educause.edu/resources/2023/6/more-than-going-live-achieving-institutional-transformation-through-erp-implementation

Murphy, L., Rapin, B., & Stanley, T. (2023). ERP implementation stories of struggle & success: A CTO & CEO share lessons learned. CampusWorks. https://www.campusworksinc.com/higher-ed-erp-implementation-stories-of-struggle-and-success/

Whatfix. (2025). 10 Workday implementation challenges and solutions [2025 guide]. Whatfix. https://whatfix.com/blog/workday-implementation-challenges/

Last updated on June 22, 2026