Name: Beyond Software: How Intel’s Support Model Unlocks 5x ROI
Uploaded: 2026-02-26T19:31:00.576Z
Duration: 59 min 20 s
Description: Beyond Software: How Intel’s Support Model Unlocks 5x ROI

Transcript for "Beyond Software: How Intel’s Support Model Unlocks 5x ROI": Good day, everyone, and welcome to today's session, another session on looking forward with Workday. And this session is gonna be on a topic that I am extremely passionate about, and we're gonna get into conversations about governance and support teams and some of the characteristics that help you drive the most success with Workday's platform. So a couple things before we kick off and really get started here. It wouldn't be a presentation unless we had a product statement. So although I highly doubt we're gonna be talking about future looking items, if we do, they're all covered underneath this product statement. So with that, let's cover off on a couple more housekeeping items, before we get into our content for today. So first off, on item number one is this webinar will be available for you within twenty four hours of the conclusion of it. So we'll be emailing you a link so you can get back to the recording of all the material that we've covered. Another item that's important is questions and answers. If you look over to the right hand side of your screen, you should see something that says q and a. We do have people behind the scenes that are gonna be answering questions real time. Fair warning, we may not be able to answer all the questions, but we do commit to following up with you with the appropriate answers. So please be active on there. I've got friends back there that really wanna answer questions. Next thing is resources. So also up in the upper right hand corner of the screen, you should see an item called docs. And there are a number of resources that we tagged on there for you to go ahead and download to leverage in a future state to continue to drive forward with some of the things that you're gonna see, and we'll touch on those at the end as well. And then lastly, we've also got a survey that we will be issuing towards the end. And please, please, we are a culture of feedback at Workday. We wanna hear if this session was valuable and important, but we also wanna hear what are the things that you need to understand in order to continue to progress with our solutions. So give us that feedback, and there's more opportunities for us to share information as we go forward. So let's go ahead and jump into our agenda for today. We're gonna do some quick welcomes and introductions, and then we're gonna go ahead and get into some governance best practices from a Workday point of view and really drill into why that matters. Following that section, we'll go ahead and introduce, Intel to share a little bit of their story, their structure and approach, guiding principles, and how they drive value with Workday solutions. And then towards the end of the session, we're saving some time for some q and a, and doing a little bit of back and forth. So be expecting that towards the end, as well. So with that being said, what I'd like to do is go ahead and introduce Jeff to the stage, to say hello. Hey, and good morning, John. Good morning, everybody on the line. So my name is Jeff Bairbanks. I'm senior director HR technology at Intel Corporation. And looking forward to sharing some of the things that we do on the governance side of the house, and hopefully you'll find some key takeaways that'll be a help to you. So looking forward to the discussion today. Awesome. Thanks a lot, Jeff. And myself, I'm John Hunchki. I know that name is a big long name and a mouthful, but I'm a senior principal on Workday's strategy and value consulting practice. And I just wanna spend a moment to touch on that because you're gonna see some of the work that we actually do on our team, and I think it's important you understand who we are and what we do. So our purpose, our entire existence is focused on helping organizations identify, measure, maximize the benefits that can be attained from our solutions. A quick touch on what we do in our work products is, number one, we focus on supporting financial justification for organizations that are looking to make investments in our platform. And that could be investments in geographical expansions and understanding what the value means by doing so. It can also mean investments in new product areas that you're looking to understand what can be the benefits associated with that. We also do a lot of work on item number two that you're seeing here, which is baselining existing capabilities. And we baseline existing capabilities within our customers for a few different reasons. Number one, if organizations are interested on modernizing technology within a certain function, we can give you an understanding of where you're at today and where we see other customers and how they progress with Workday's capabilities. But more importantly and specifically for this call is item number three. When we take that baseline measurement and we compare that against benchmarks for other Workday customers that are operating in the same area, and we're identifying gaps to help you identify where opportunities are to drive more automation, more controls, etcetera. Last thing I would say on our team is we're about a 100 consultants globally. We're management consultants by trade, the majority of us, and we run personalized consultative approaches in order to help our customers progress with our capability set. So with that being said, I thought we would kick off the start of our conversation today with one of my operating mantras, which is success with Workday starts with governance. A customer's operating structure is the single most critical factor in realizing long term value with our solutions. And what I mean by that is the size of your team, the structure of your team, how you align with the business, the guiding principles that you instill are incredibly important and probably the most important factor to getting results out of our solutions. So with that being said, what I do want to invite Jeff is to talk a little bit about some of the outcomes that Intel has experienced by operating with a strong governance and operating model. Yeah, thanks, John. Yeah. I think some of the key things for us that we've been able to accomplish due in large part to our governance model and how we approach it is we continue to see value from the platform, and we continue to get more value from the platform over time. I think for a couple of reasons. So one, I think, one, I'd like to call out Workday as a strategic partner for us. And so we view Workday as part of our team. And so we work closely with them to identify where we have opportunities. And then, of course, we have a governance model and process in place that really helps us drive and deliver the capabilities that we need to improve our business. A couple of things I'd like to highlight here. So one, we've been able to end of life a lot of legacy platforms and systems with our transition to Workday. And then over time, as we continue to leverage more Workday capabilities and adopt more of Workday's features, we continue to end of life systems and platforms. Last year, we end of life three pretty sizable platforms, and so that continues. I think the other thing as well is as we take advantage of more of Workday's features, our workforce becomes more productive. So our managers, our employees, our HR back office. And so you can see the 5x improvement there that we've seen over time. And, again, I think doing a large part to our governance model and how we approach deploying and taking advantage of Workday features and capabilities. Awesome. Thanks a ton. So what I wanna take the conversation into right now is just to give you a little bit of history from some of the work that our team has done. And, specifically, this was an engagement that I conducted with with one of Workday's customers. So getting into kind of what I was saying about that capabilities assessment and our opportunity to actually, measure where you're currently at, what I wanna orient you is with a little screen here on what that assessment work ends up being. If you look over on the left hand side, what you're seeing is all the different functional areas that we typically dive into when we're doing assessments with organizations to understand their current capability state. Underneath each one of those functional areas, we ask a series of questions in order to determine where you should or where you are placed. And a lot of those questions we ask are oriented towards what Workday's value proposition is. So let me take you a little bit further on here. Based on the answers to all those questions within each of these functions, we actually place you on a loose five point Likert maturity scale. The questions that we ask, going back to our value proposition, are all oriented around what's what's the level of technology consolidation you've been able to do with Workday. What's your ability to respond to business change? So how agile are you when updates need to be made? What's your level of automation is another factor that we ask a series of questions around within each functional area. And we also ask what's the real time decision support. So are you leveraging analytics in order to give people decision making abilities? And then last and foremost, how much self-service, how much automation have you pushed out to your different business stakeholders? So based on that, what I wanted to do is just focus in on what we white label as the Workday support team. And that's marked on this slide as HRIS and HRIT. So if you look at what you're seeing as far as the placement for where this organization is with their Workday capabilities, you're seeing that pretty far behind what we would typically see our customers on average operating in. Now this is a big indication that we wanna scratch a little bit deeper and figure out more about what's happening behind the scenes. But the other thing I wanted to call out too is that impact on a particular function such as recruiting, which that functional area with Workday has also progressed pretty far back, to the left. So, again, pretty far behind that Workday benchmark. So let's take a look at this Workday support team, that operating structure, and some of the things that we typically ask in order to understand what's happening. So here's that more detailed breakout, but what I wanna do is focus on a few particular questions that surround governance and the operating model of the support team itself. So if you're looking at that first question at the very top, it's teasing out what's the change management that happens. Is it thoughtful on how you actually roll out certain capabilities? And, again, notice where that marker is set on how they're currently operating with Workday as it relates to change. Look at that next question down, which is do you have a strong governance model? So although the change isn't good, they've got an incredibly strong governance model that pushes them beyond the Workday benchmark over to the right hand side, which is very interesting to me. As you go to that next question, it says, hey. What's the skill set of your team? Do you have strong skills, good workday chops? In order to respond, do you have a solid understanding? Again, that's very far down the list. And then if you look at that last question, is your operating model agile so you can adjust a change as change is needed and change happens? Well, lo and behold, from this survey, we started to ask some very direct questions about how this organization was operating. Lo and behold, what they had in place was an AMS provider where essentially all the Workday configuration knowledge, all the Workday product knowledge resided. Alright? So they didn't have it internally in order to align with the business. And the reason you see that strong governance structure all the way over to the right hand side is all the governance around capability deployments and delivery was all happening within the AMS provider, which wasn't connected to the business at all. So, yes, they did have a strong governance structure, but they also had an incredibly long backlog, and they couldn't respond to any of the demand that was being placed by the business. Now let's look at the business side of things and take a look at recruiting in a little bit more detail. So here's that recruiting functional area and all the different questions that we ask associated with that. But what I wanna do is focus in on a few particular areas. And if you look at that first question at towards the top, can the function quickly respond? This is what I always call the agility question. Can the function respond quickly? I I need a new column on a report. I need this slight change to what's happening within this current business process, and how quickly can I get that done? Well, lo and behold, that strong governance structure all externally within the EMS provider, a small business request would be made, but it would end up at the very tail end of this long backlog. So it'd be months before the business could get anything that they were truly trying to drive. So that's why you see that agility factor in the business push back so far below what that benchmark is. The other thing that's interesting is the impact on that. Highly challenged as it related to some of the job requisition processes. The overall automation across the recruit the the recruiting flow was also incredibly challenged as well. And then lastly, if you look at that hiring team collaboration, which is a factor that we typically drive with Workday recruiting, that was also incredibly challenged too. All of these characteristics highlight that there's friction that exists on the organization's ability to deploy capabilities in order to meet business needs. And coincidentally, with this organization, what we helped do was model what we think is an appropriate sized Workday team based on their operating characteristics, complexity, geographical configuration, etcetera. And after working with them, what they did is they went to market and they hired six people to bring into their internal Workday support team to drive alignment with the business so they could start to get the capabilities out the door more quickly and satisfy those needs. So an example, going back to that statement that I made on how that materializes in our customer base and why we're truly saying it's very important for you. So what I'd like to do is go ahead and hit on a quick polling slide, for a moment just to gain an understanding from your side on what you think is drives the most value realization within your Workday platform. So what would you rate as the most important factor to driving value realization with Workday from your side? We'd love to see your results. And what I'm envisioning is we should be able to see progression along here. There we go. Like that. A little bit of governance and operating models. So buying into what we're saying. Capabilities, definitely come into the equation. I wouldn't discount that. Organizational change, very important too. Business alignment. Yep. I was just gonna highlight the business alignment aspect of that. I'll touch on some of that in my slides, but I think that's an important piece as well. Huge. K. We're starting to even out. Awesome. Thank you for that. So what I wanna do is just touch on a few more things before turning it over to Jeff, and we'll do a few more polling questions before doing so as well. So a couple things here. Support team skills and the activity distribution. So the comment that I really wanna make is depending on where you came from, if you came from more legacy providers as you moved into this, you know, software as a service, this true cloud operating model, there's a difference in these skills and the skill sets that are actually leveraged. So what I wanna highlight on this particular slide is what we see happening is a shift in skills from being strong and highly technical. If you think about some of the legacy environments where it gets which get incredibly custom over time, we see that shift more towards the business side of the equation towards, I should say, the functional side of the equation, which is stronger alignment, more analyst responsibilities and capabilities, alignment with the business to truly understand what those needs are and translate those needs into how I can configure solutions how I can deploy capabilities quickly. That's the operating model when you think about SaaS. So I am not seeing inside of here, if you think about it isn't 25% of the resources are in in IT and 75% actually reside in the business. That really doesn't matter. What matters is the actual skills and making sure that these items are covered in some way, shape, or form and reducing a lot of the friction. We do see capabilities go closer to the function on configuration and deployment in order to satisfy some of that agility standpoint. But if you think about what's happening with AI, if you think about capabilities that Workday provides, like like Extend as an example, in order to expand on the platform and build some of those customer utilities, we do see resources actually leveling out between some of these organizations. But, again, the important thing is making sure that these areas of these skills are actually being covered. Next thing I just wanted to touch on is a little bit of the area work. And I'm sure that everybody on the call is very familiar with how you're working today and where the segments of work reside. You obviously have the program management side of things, but I wanna shift down to the lower right hand corner here and talk a little bit about change management as well. Oftentimes, gets categorized into a training program and getting trained on a solution. But I think the more important aspects are the communication, the executive alignment, the executive sponsorship, making sure your stakeholders are completely aligned with the solutions, but also holding people accountable to what their responsibilities are. And then the training actually helps to support that. The other two areas that I wanted to highlight are the day to day management associated with your solutions that you're operating today, and in the upper right hand corner, the optimization and innovation over time. Now we put these in two different categories because we truly see the need in both areas. I often say that you're never done implementing Workday. It's never a closed solution for you. You've got the opportunity to leverage the features that come in in in our biannual updates. So you continuously have the opportunity to align with business on needs, search for Workday capabilities, and create that alignment. So we see resources sometimes split between both of those categories. It just cannot be the day to day management. Otherwise, you're not driving the full value that you can out of the solution. Couple more quick items before we hit on a few more polls here. Governance and operating model characteristics. So I often speak to this really quickly. But if you think about your team model, the size, the operating structure, the skills associated with it, that is obviously incredibly important, and you need to be right sized in order to consume these capabilities that we're releasing and continue to innovate over time. When you think about your your governance and it's specifically your guiding principles being incredibly important to drive stakeholder alignment and in order to help drive decision making on what should be the choices that we make when we think about bringing in technology capabilities. Operations and tools, you gotta have the tools in place to look at the top of the funnel for request. Value optimization and and those characteristics, that gets into that upper right hand corner that I just spoke about. But especially identifying the outcomes that you're gonna impact by bringing these capabilities in, measuring where you're at with those capability areas today and any KPIs that are connected to those capabilities. And then as you close out deploying some of those capabilities, remeasuring against that to see what you've been able to do. But that doesn't end. You should be continuously measuring against some of what the business is trying to accomplish, the outcomes they're trying to approve, and create an alignment to the technical capabilities that can help them get there. And then the last thing I'll say is on strategic vendor relationship is is have a tight relationship with your strategic vendors. I often say that we're the mechanism that can help bring your capabilities to life and help you bring those capabilities to the business and help them drive alignment on what they're truly trying to accomplish. So leverage your vendors in order to help you get to where you wanna go. If platform consolidation is a key factor that you're driving for, that should absolutely be a part of what your guiding principles are in order to frame decisions across the key stakeholders that are involved. So with that, what I wanna do is just close with one final slide. If you feel you need help going back to that previous customer example on figuring out your support team, we've collected a lot of data behind the scenes about how Workday, what the model should be, and we're more than happy to work with you to gain an understanding of that. And I'll touch on a little bit of more of those things in a little bit. Before handing it over to Jeff, we do wanna go ahead and hit on a few more polling questions just to gain some feedback from where you're currently at. And the first one that we wanted to hit on here is which organization owns and manages product configuration with Workday? Is it your business side? Is it within the context of IT? Or does it live within an outsourced provider? So a little statement here is I often say that it's about eighty twenty, but what I would say is the percentages don't matter. What matters is those connections and the activities and that connection to the business as being the an important factor from my standpoint. So, Jeff, we're at about seventy, thirty here from the way that it looks. Found this on. the way. And there goes my Siri. Yeah. I mean, I I think it's consistent with how we do things. I'll touch on that here in a little bit too. But I think for us, we intentionally made a decision. We felt like configuration was more about application of our policies, our business decisions, those types of things in the system, more so than technical development, and we wanted that to sit close to that expertise. And so we do that on the HR side at Intel. Great. Thanks, Jeff. All right. And I think we have one more polling question before I hand it over to you. All right. And this next one is, do you have adequate headcount and experience on your Workday support team to get the most value out of the platform? And we're not seeing the responses. There we go. Maybe we should've added one that said, can I have more? That would have been the right one to ask. I think everybody would have said yes. Alright. So pretty good split. Looks like some people are indicating that there could be some opportunities to actually grow the team in order to align with the business, deploy more capabilities. Okay. Awesome. Thanks for the feedback. And now, Jeff, over to you. Okay, yeah. I wanted to start today by just telling you a little bit about Intel, who we are and the type of company that we are. So we are Intel is a leading provider of silicon globally and so we are unique in that we are an idea, an integrated device manufacturer. What that means is that we design, manufacture, and sell our own silicon products, mainly chips. And so that's our primary business. That's what we do. We have about 85,000 employees around the world, and we operate in more than 65 countries around the world. Our key operating segments, so things that you might be familiar with, one, we call it comp client computing. That is the chips and components that are used in computers, PCs, things that you might use every day. We also build and deliver products for data center as well as AI. And then we're expanding our foundry operations. What foundry is, is we will manufacture chips for other companies, primarily companies who don't have their own manufacturing facilities. And so that's our foundry business line. We had about $52,000,000,000 in revenue in 2025, and so pretty sizable company. And then just some interesting facts about Intel. So we are The US leader in leading edge silicon manufacturing in The US. So there's nobody who manufactures more advanced silicon than we do in The United States. We use 99% of renewable electricity globally, and we have a goal to get that to 100% by 2030. And then we've been a Workday customer since 2016, so just approaching ten years now on the Workday platform. This next slide here really kind of shows you what our Workday footprint is. And so you can see what we use, you can also see what we're exploring and evaluating, and you can also see what we don't use. We're largely a human capital management user of Workday products. So we use the the HCM suite, talent acquisition, talent management, and then we do US payroll as well. And then we have some workforce management that we use. We don't use any financials, and so but we are continually evaluating Workday's offerings and products, to see, if it makes sense for us to take advantage of those. So but this gives you an idea of, what we use, capabilities that we use from Workday. I also wanted to start by sharing a high level HR organization structure with you. So this will provide some context as we get into the governance discussion. You can kind of, you'll understand more of the roles that we have in HR and how those roles play in our governance model. I'm gonna start right in the middle there with the green boxes. So the green boxes there represent our business HR teams. And we have business HR leaders tied to each of our business units internally. So our VHR business HR teams, that is the face of HR to the business. That's typically where we get our demand signal from on the capability and technology front. The blue boxes there, those are our COEs, our centers of expertise. And so this is where domain expertise lies, right, for specific functions within HR. The primary. role of our COEs is to design and deliver solutions that meet those business needs that are identified by VHR and with that connection back to the business. My organization, we sit in People Solutions on the bottom there, so we have a couple of horizontal functions that support all of HR. People Solutions is one of those. And in People Solutions, we provide technology, analytics, and operations support for all of HR. And then at the top there, we have our Global Services. And HR Global Services is really the execution arm of HR. They're primarily responsible for delivering employee and manager service delivery. And so this kind of gives you a flavor for how we're structured as well as some of the roles and responsibilities that we have within the HR organization. I think one of the key things that has really enabled us to be successful with our governance model has been the technology roles and responsibilities that we have. Like many of you, we have a partnership with IT, and we have a very strong and a very good partnership with our IT organization. So it we truly do embody a one team approach. I don't view them as a separate team. So they have a seat at the table. We partner very, very closely together with IT, and the relationship is strong. It's solid. So we very much value that relationship and partnership that we have with IT. And I think one of the things that has allowed us to build such a strong partnership with our IT team is that we were very deliberate about establishing clear roles and responsibilities. Not just roles and responsibilities, but the accountability that comes along with it as well. So you can see some of the things that we do in HR that we're responsible for, that we have clear accountability to deliver, is really driving the business value and also the direction for our HR technology strategy. And so, you know, so we are responsible for driving our HR technology vision. We're responsible for developing and delivering the HR technology roadmap. We also determine the priorities, right? So what is the priority for HR? What are we gonna focus on? And what are we gonna deliver? That sits on the HR side of the house. And again, I will say IT is involved along every step of the way, but those are the things that we own, that we make decisions for. I touched on the configuration earlier, but for us, we deliberately put our configuration in HR because, like I said earlier, that we really felt it aligned closer to applying our business practices, business policies, and business decisions in in the solution. And so so we have our HR team do the configuration, not just for Workday, but that applies across all of the software as a service solutions that we use. And so all of that configuration is done in HR for the same reason. Our IT team is really responsible for technical enablement. So they own our technical arc architecture, technical design. They do all of our development work. Right? So any integration development work, that's done by our IT team. They also build custom solutions. When we need custom solutions, they do that development as well. And then they also own platform extensions, so things like Workday Extend. Right? That is their owned, and they deliver on Workday Extend. So, again, it's great partnership that we have together. And I think the clear accountability, the clear lines, we never fight about who's gonna do what or who owns what. It's clear. We know that. And so it enables us to kind of just partner together and really, like I said, embody a one team spirit and approach to how we govern the technology. I did have some numbers in here that you can see. We have a pretty complex HR technology ecosystem. We've got about 172 applications and platforms that we use across HR. Our goal, we're trying to simplify and really reduce that number. We wanna get that number down as low as we possibly can. We still have some work to do there, obviously, but we've made a lot of good progress over the last few years, I think primarily due to our governance model and how we approach HR technology. You can see the breakdown there between software as a service, commercial off the shelf products, and also custom solutions. We have a complex integration ecosystem as well, about three thirty nine integrations connected to our Workday system. And then I put a little bit here to give you a flavor of what our support model looks like. And so again, we have HR dedicated HR support. We have dedicated IT support. And you can see the numbers there that support our our our technology products in HR. So we have about 25 people dedicated, to to systems and technology in HR, about 17 people dedicated to analytics, and then we have 37 people in IT that support our HR products as well. And again, my takeaway from this one, HR drives the business value and direction. IT ensures secure, scalable, reliable architecture and delivery. And then together, it really allows us that clear accountability allows us to really effectively manage our complex ecosystem. So next I wanted to share another key component for us is making sure that we have a clear HR technology strategy. So we want to make sure that everybody is fully aligned on our approach, what we're trying to accomplish and how we deliver technology. So our strategy there is across the top, and then we anchor that on strategic pillars, which are on the bottom of the slide here. And so number one, the first thing that we want to do is prioritize our strategic platform. So we we really want to use what we have as best as we can. Right? So that means really leveraging the capabilities that our providers deliver. If it's included in our subscription, we want to use it. For HR, Workday is our core HR system of record, and so we typically look to Workday first. We also know that, you know, in many cases or in some cases, those strategic platforms are not able to meet your business need for one reason or another. And in those instances, we intentionally use a smart multisourcing strategy. Again, the intent there being we want to augment those strategic platforms with best in class capabilities, typically delivered through software as a service or commercial off the shelf or even managed service provider solutions. Our split here, so we want about 80% of our HR capabilities to be delivered through the Workday platform, about 20% through other solutions. And so that's kind of the mix that we're targeting with Workday and other. And then third here, we do do some internally custom built, selective. And so we do that only when there is a specific business need that we need to meet, and we can't get that from Workday or there's not an acceptable solution, that we can augment with. So, we do some selective there. I think, you know, realistically, just kind of within the current state, I think we're open to doing more development as those tools become easier and simpler to use and speed that process up. So but for us, it's still more in the selective space, I would say. And then our technology pillars, one, we wanna make sure that we're simplifying the tech stack. I mentioned we've got the 172 applications and platforms. Our goal is to continue to reduce and drive that lower. And so the way that we do that is by leveraging our strategic platforms, like I said, optimizing those, leveraging the capabilities that are available to us through those strategic platforms. I think the next thing here, like everybody here on the line, I'm sure we have a strategy to integrate AI into our HR processes, systems, and tools. And so we're we're making a huge effort to do that. I think our vendors are gonna be a key part of how we deliver AI into our our ecosystem. We think, you know, leveraging partners like Workday, we can do it faster. We can scale it faster. And so that's a key objective for us. And then also just making sure that we have a clear operating system and consistency in how we govern and manage our HR technology ecosystem. That's awesome. Thanks for that. And why don't we do a why don't we go ahead and do another quick poll, before you continue on here, Jeff, and let's see some results. So which organization establishes a strategy for HR finance technology at your organization. Interesting. So what we would have expected, Jeff. Yep. Pretty, pretty consistent, it looks like. Yeah. I'm very happy we're not seeing the outsource provider establish here. So that was a little bit of a trick question. Yeah. So a good mix. Thank you. Back to you, Jeff. All right, so in addition to clear roles and responsibilities and accountability, in addition to a clear strategy, Another thing that we've done is we've established some clear guiding principles for HR technology. So one of the key tenets for us, what we try to do with our HR technology decisions is push those down to the lowest appropriate level in the organization on both the HR side and the IT side of the house. And to do that effectively, we wanted to make sure that we had clear guiding principles for those decision makers. These guiding principles really are a guide that our decision makers can use to make sure that we're doing things consistently and making decisions consistently across HR as we evaluate new solutions and as we seek to deploy new capabilities across the organization. So I won't go through all of these. I think I touched on one and two already with our strategy. Number three, like everyone else, like I said, responsible AI adoption is important for us. We plan to use vendors, like I said, to kind of accelerate some of the delivery and AI capabilities available to us. I think we'll employ a hybrid approach as well where we'll have instances where we'll build agents, and then we'll have to figure out how we orchestrate those together. But I think we're gonna use a hybrid approach going forward. And so and then, of course, we need to do it responsibly. Right? So we need to make sure that we're we we have ethical we follow ethical standards, that we're transparent about what we're doing with AI, accountability, all of those things matter. Right? And so we wanna make sure that any AI we leverage at Intel has done so in a responsible way. I think another key guiding principle for us is the end to end design thinking. And so we we want our when our COEs are partnering with business HR to evaluate solutions and design solutions, we really wanna look end to end, right, from the beginning upstream all the way to the end downstream, including partners, vendors that may be involved in the process along the way. We wanna consider that full that entire flow in the design process. We also wanna factor in employee and manager experience. Right? So I think that end to end design thinking is critical for us and helps us design better solutions, but also take better advantage of what's available to us. And then, of course, the last thing here and something this is something that's really important to us at Intel is we call it balancing the three Cs. We wanna make sure that we balance capabilities, cost, and controls. And so we wanna make sure we get the right capabilities that meet the business need first, but we also wanna make sure that we we spend responsibly and that we get those capabilities for the right cost. Right? So our goal isn't to be the cheapest technology provider in the world, right? But we also don't want to be the most expensive. So I think somewhere in the middle that gives us the capabilities that we need is appropriate. So this slide here is kind of a view of our operating system, our tech operating system, and this is kind of what brings it all together. And this really is the mechanism that allows us to connect our strategy to execution. And so as I mentioned earlier, our business HR teams are really the face of HR to the business. They're our demand signal. We want everything that we do in the technology and capability delivery space. We want that to be tied back to a specific business need. So something that one of our business units needs to function better, deliver capabilities, manage talent better, whatever it might be. Our VHR really helps produce that demand signal. They partner closely with COEs and with our IT teams to design products and solutions, and so they look for alternatives. So they're the like I said, the COE is where the domain expertise lies. They have that knowledge. They help us translate that demand signal from BHR into business requirements, and then they look for solutions and alternatives to meet those business requirements. Our governance is where we do the monitor and control. So we have a technology working group, that's led by HR. This is our primary governance function, so it's a it's a biweekly meeting. And we have everybody in that meeting that is required to make decisions for technology. So we have our HR leaders. We have IT leaders and product managers. We have solutions architects in there. We even have our purchasing and sourcing partners in there as well as data privacy and security. So all these people are in that meeting. They're empowered to make decisions, right, for their organization and for their teams. And so we use this meeting as a decision making body. And we also make sure that our strategy, guiding principles, they've been adhered to. Right? So, again, monitor and control there. So once we approve new technology or new capabilities, we put those on our roadmap. So we have an integrated technology roadmap. This helps us manage sequencing, dependencies, timing for launch, and is really the mechanism we use to go and execute. And then, of course, we partner with enablement teams, the sustaining teams who are gonna own this after it's launched, And we partner with them closely to make sure that things are ready for delivery and ready for sustaining. And the cycle repeats, right? So this is the cycle that we follow for all new technology capabilities and requests. As part of that, this is kind of a next level down on our operating mechanism. This is more related to the technology delivery life cycle. And so but what I wanted to show here is that we do have a structured and stage gated delivery model. And so as our VHR identifies the business demand and the signal as they work with COEs to identify potential solutions and design those potential solutions. We also have a structured intake process, right? So at the very beginning of that process, they come in, they bring it into intake. And in the intake process, we want to make sure that we have executive level sponsorship, that there's appropriate funding available to move forward with the solution. We wanna make sure that we have it really meets a business need aligned to our HR strategic objectives or specific business needs. And that and like I said, we have appropriate sponsorship for the initiative. We don't wanna get too far down the path and consume those important resources if we don't have funding or we don't have the support required to move those initiatives forward to deployment. So we take care of that upfront. We make sure that we have everything that we need before we move forward. That's really the purpose of our intake process. Once it's been approved at intake, it comes into the tech working group. And like I said on the previous slide, this is really where the governance happens, right? So we make sure that we're following our strategy, guiding principles have been followed. We kind of monitor and control here with the tech working group. We also have a technical review. I mentioned IT owns the technical architecture, technical design. They have steps that they need to make sure are followed, right, and that there are standards that need to be met. They do that through a technical review committee. And then change control is owned by HR as well, and I think that's more for launch readiness. Right? So we not only do we want our systems to be technically ready, but we want them to be business ready as well, right? So HR owns change control. So this is kind of our gated process where we have specific decision points and, again, clear accountability and decision makers for this process as well. And then lastly, I wanted to share our RAD model. So another thing that works really well for us is having a very clear, well defined decision making model for HR technology. And again, there's no ambiguity here. We know who makes decisions. We know who's responsible for making the decisions on both the HR and the IT side of the house. And so it really it takes any confusion out of the mix, right? So again, we know who's going to be the decision maker. And as I mentioned earlier, we really try to push decisions down to the lowest level in the organization, the lowest appropriate level in the organization. And that's what we have here in the speed box. And so, and if you look at that speed box, that's where we want the highest number of our decisions to be made. Those are the people that are equipped with the experience and the knowledge to make those decisions. We want them to make those decisions. But you also want to make sure that they have some structure around how they make those decisions, and that's what this RAD model does. And so I think another key thing that I would call out here, we do have an escalation path to find. We realize that sometimes decisions can't be made in the speed box or sometimes something different needs to happen outside of our model. And so we have an escalation path to handle those types of situations. I view escalation as a bad thing. It just means maybe in a certain situation, something different is required. And so we wanna make sure that we have a process to handle that. But, again, clear decision making removes confusion, enables us to move faster, helps us make the right decisions consistently across HR. And so those are the key components of our HR tech operating model. And, you found something useful in it today. But, John, I will turn it back over to you. That was great, Jeff. Thank you so, so much. And if it isn't apparent, Jeff and I have worked together for a number of years. In fact, all my thirteen years that I've actually been at Workday, I've known Jeff. And the one thing that I can say wholeheartedly is that when he says there are clear responsibilities defined and they operate as one team between HR and IT, that is 100% the truth. You wouldn't know the difference, and you would think they were completely together and as one team when you're working with them. So let's go ahead and do a couple of polling questions as we move to wrap up the call here. And the next one that I wanted to hit on is has the question disappeared on me? There we go. Alright. How often does your team engage with senior business leaders, stakeholders in the business to align on their priorities, understand what their challenges are and their capability gaps that might exist, and their needs to inform your tech road map. Interesting. Yeah. The monthly cadence, I I figured, Jeff, that would be kind of the case, is a monthly connect. Oh, we got some quarterly, Looks like lot of quarterly. like quarterly is jumping into the lead there. Annually, maybe at the highest level annually to set a complete operating rhythm for the entire year. Yeah. Very interesting. Awesome. Alright. And I think we do have one more polling question, if I'm not mistaken. Alright. How strong is your partnership and engagement with your Workday account team? So you heard me mention that previously, right, as being an important factor, and we truly feel we help bring and bring capabilities to life, help do some of that alignment with the business. Yeah. This one's interesting too. A lot of traditional vendor type relationships there. And I know I said it earlier, but I just reiterated again. I think we partner with Workday as a strategic partner, and I think that's made a huge difference for us. We we have I call it a direct line, John. I don't know if you would agree, but I feel like we have a line in with Workday, and we can get information and clarity on the products, on the solutions that are delivered. It doesn't mean we buy everything that we review with them, but we come away with a much better understanding of what Workday can and can't do in certain situations. And it really helps us with our decision making. So I would encourage you, if you don't, definitely partner with Workday and see how you can develop that strategic relationship with them. Thanks, Jeff. Awesome. Alright. So let's go ahead and progress this forward a little bit more as we move towards wrapping up the discussion. Alright. So don't leave yet, everybody. We've got a few more important things to do, and then we're gonna do some q and a. But I do wanna highlight again resources on the documents option over to the right hand side of the screen. So the two that I do wanna mention, and I'll repeat this in a little bit too, but executive briefing series. So depending on depending on your level is what I would say. The executive briefing series can give you a really, really good contextual understanding of, at a senior leadership level, how should you be operating with Workday. So it's weird it's shorter snippets of information in order to provide guidance. And there's a couple of items inside of there that are incredibly important, building your support team as well as establishing and designing your governance model. So at a senior leadership level, that can be a great starting point. Because we are so passionate about this topic at Workday and because we've truly connected how governance structure drives results on our platform, we've also made available a support team operating model and governance kit, which is available through Workday Community. Now that takes the previous executive series and unpacks it into a multi hour course that you can take to gain more of an understanding of the characteristics and the operating structures that you can bring into play. So with that, what we'll do is go ahead and progress ourselves forward here, and we'll do a little bit of q and a. And before looking at some of what the audience has provided and maybe doing some cherry picking there, I wanted to share a little a quick story, and then I wanted to ask Jeff a question for myself personally. So the story I wanted to share is I had the opportunity to work with a large retailer in The US, an incredibly large retailer. And the interesting thing is they were trying to progress off a heavily customized version of PeopleSoft, which I know many organizations have that have migrated over to Workday. But I remember getting into the conversation with the VP of HR technology, and the first question I asked her was, can you please articulate what's the business function of HR trying to accomplish? What are their priorities? You have an idea of the outcomes they're looking to drive? And her response was shocking. Her response was, no. I don't have that information, and nor do they share any of that with me. Now the reason I bring that story up is my reply to that statement was, we've got a problem here. You're responsible for delivering capabilities that they need in order to run their business, yet you don't have an understanding of what they're trying to accomplish. So we've gotta bridge that gap in some way in order to help figure out how you can actually start a project and think about modernizing on whatever platform you end up modernizing on. But you gotta have that clear alignment. So, Jeff, I guess the question that I would ask you from my standpoint, would you mind just giving a little insight of how important that stakeholder alignment is and some of that sponsorship and that connection to the business is from your standpoint? Yeah, yeah, from our standpoint, I think it's absolutely critical to have that alignment. So we call it business alignment at Intel, it is baked into our model, right? So we intentionally go out there and make sure that we stay aligned with our not only our HR partners and the connection back to the business units, but also with our IT partners. Right? So it takes effort. Right? You have to put some effort into it. It just doesn't happen naturally. But that's something that we take the lead in. Right? So we go and make that happen. We don't wait for our leadership to drive it. Right? So that's something that we push and own and drive and that we're accountable for. And so that's how we do it. But, again, absolutely critical. Helps with the speed, velocity, right, as well as the capability delivery, making sure that you're meeting those critical business needs. Awesome. Thanks a lot, Jeff. Let's do a question online, and I'm looking looks like somebody is asking or making a comment about the eighty twenty rule and. asking how you work with business stakeholders to evaluate capabilities delivered. And then it says balancing needs versus what might be considered as nice to haves. Any comments that you might share on that one? Yeah, that's a challenge. That's a good question. That's a challenge, right, for us because a lot of times when you're looking at solutions, you know, shiny new objects, bells and whistles, they can be real enticing. Right? And so and and in the AI world, there's plenty of them out there. And so for us, it's really about, distilling the requirements down to what's needed. Right? What's gonna be required to deliver business value and meet business needs? Our approach is, hey. If Workday can meet 80 of those requirements, that's the path we're gonna take. Right? So, again, we try to apply that rule to kinda help kinda ground us in the evaluation process, but that's our guide. Right? If Workday can meet 80%, that's likely the path that we're gonna go. Cool. Thank you, Jeff. You know, what's funny is that reminds me, when you were out at our corporate office in a customer visitor center, I remember sharing a presentation to your senior leaders, and I'll never forget the comment that your CIO made when I was presenting. And I was talking about how important that business alignment actually is and how it manifests and what it actually means. And I remember saying the word, and I used the term perceived requirements Mhmm. was what I actually said. And your CIO stopped me mid sentence and said, can you please repeat that? And so I repeated the statement and said perceived requirements. And I'll forget. His comment was, that's a nice choice of words, John. Right? Yeah. So knowing that the complexities that Intel is operated in and if you look at that structure about why that's important in order to drive that alignment and maybe break down some of those barriers. Okay. That's great. Let's go ahead and do another question from online here. Let's see. Let's see. Let's see. Alright. Somebody is making a comment about managing long backlogs with business stakeholders and is curious how Intel manages those backlogs in order to drive results. Yeah, that's a great question, another one. So so our model, our governance model largely focuses on new technology, new capabilities, new solutions. If it's existing, in Workday with configuration, our HR cloud configuration team and IT partner closely together to manage their backlog. Right? So, again, like I said, pushing those decisions down to the lowest level in the organization, we let those we call them service lines. We let those service lines run their own backlog. Right? If they ever get into a situation where they have a priority discussion that they can't resolve, they can bring that into the tech working group for resolution. Right? But on backlog, they manage their own backlog by service line. They run it. They deliver it. They prioritize it. Technology working group and our governance model steps in when there's an impasse. Awesome. Great feedback. Thanks, Jeff. Very important. Okay. I can feel the hook coming, already. So we've got a couple minutes here to wrap up. I just wanna share a couple of takeaways with you. Most importantly, number one, your support team governance and operating model, size, structure, guiding principles, alignment with the business, that is, from our perspective, the most critical factor of driving success on our platform. Don't forget that. Ask us questions about it, and we're more than happy to follow-up with you on it. There are a ton of resources on community, and we've been investing heavily because of the relevance and importance of this. So you've got community resources, Workday success plans. If you're an success plans, Accelerate Plus customer, we've got consulting packages that wrap ourselves around your Workday support team and give you guidance and an understanding of how you should be set up for success in that area. What I would say is if you're not necessarily a Workday SuccessFlans customer, you've got opportunities to reach out beyond just your managing partner and your customer success manager. You can reach out to your Workday account team, and there might be opportunities for us to engage in order to figure out and help you in some of those areas as well. So with that being said, thank you all for your time. I really appreciate it. And as we progress, don't forget to offer some feedback for us so we can continue to fine tune these discussions going forward. So thank you so much for your time, and thank you so much, mister Fairbanks. Looking forward to seeing you again very, very soon. All right. Thanks, everybody. Thanks, John.