Terminology Strategy in a Workday® Student Deployment

2 min read

Significant time and money are often wasted on Workday® Student implementations because of people having different understandings of terms.

Workday® is a techno-functional system that has naming conventions that on the surface are easy to understand, but after taking a closer look, it's not so easy.

Workday® Terminology

Unlike Banner®, Workday® doesn't have terms with searches like "SHATERM" where no person would know what "SHATERM" means without an explanation.

However, Workday® has terms like: Active Student, Historical Academic Record, and Cohort. I love the accessibility of these terms, but it also opens up a can of worms with confusion. These are actually technical terms in Workday®, which have a specific meaning. When users assume the meaning, data is compromised.

Higher education has struggled with data governance and terminology for a long time. When I worked in Admissions I would get data requests for "Admitted Students", but clarity was needed to specify whether the person actually wanted "Committed Students". So, I would have to go back and ask lots of questions about what questions they were trying to solve. Without clarifying and reviewing technical terms regularly, you can waste significant amounts of time.

Importance of Defining Terms Early

Defining a term seems like an easy thing to do. But... you have to make sure each side understands the meaning of your definition. You could define a "Historical Academic Record" as a student NOT in the active student population. But, now you have to know what is the meaning of an "active student", which, in Workday®, is fraught with misunderstandings.

In this particular example, I like to describe a "Historical Academic Record" as a text file student that does not read off the Workday® configuration (policies and rule sets). I could add more to this based on the team in the conversation. But this isn't just a term, but a unique aspect of data concept in Workday®.

The terminology conversation is crucial because, at it's core, it is rooted in understanding the Workday® data model.