CBA has 20 apps in production that run off its now decade-old Workday system for human resources, part of a strategy to treat the software as a platform and get more from it than the native capabilities.
The bank’s Workday product owner Mark Richardson told the Workday Elevate summit that the bank has 25 product owners in the HR domain who look to innovate on the HR tech stack.
Workday sits at the centre of that stack, and of what the bank thinks of as its HR ‘platform’.
This, Richardson said, is capable of meeting about 80 percent of the requirements.
But he said the bank wanted to do more, and that meant creating custom apps that extend Workday’s core functionality; these apps are built with Workday Extend.
Richardson said the bank is also using ServiceNow and AWS to run aspects of these enhancements as well.
“Our [HR] platform strategy has Workday at the centre, but [then] we do … a lot of work around the edges for it,” Richardson said.
“It used to be a matter of, ‘This is what’s available in Workday, tell me if you want it or not’.
“[But] having been on [Workday] for 10 years, we want to do more.
“[So] we have gone and built our own API frameworks where we think Workday doesn’t work at the volume and thresholds that we need, and that allows us to build AI large language models that we potentially wouldn’t get out of Workday from a roadmap perspective.”
Richardson said the 25 product owners in HR participate in CBA’s big room planning, a quarterly activity that brings together people from across the bank to coordinate delivery activities and goals.
The activity is one of the outcomes of CBA’s implementation of company-wide Agile, which occurred under what the bank calls its Pace transformation.
“I think the expectation around what can we do on Workday is that we’re still firmly grounded in how we use our platforms and our partners for what Workday is doing directly, work out where we’re special, and that gets us to the [question of], ‘Do we go and build around the edges?’” Richardson said.
The bank is a frequent participant at Workday’s annual DevCon event, given its intent to push Workday beyond what it can do natively.
Its efforts on Workday led the vendor’s Asia Pacific CTO Shan Moorthy to laud, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, the bank’s learned innovation nous with the platform.
“One of the testaments to CommBank’s innovation commitment is when they show up for DevCon, our developer conference for engineers who actually build Extend apps, API integrations and all that sort of stuff for Workday – they attract more people around them than we do,” Moorthy said.
CBA moved from a PeopleSoft core to Workday back in 2015.
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