Company
ActiveWorkday
Pleasanton, California · Since 2005
Still independent. It sells the system many large employers use to hire, pay, and record their staff.
A later timeline chapter projects a role for this organization. That chapter is a projection. This page is about the institution as it exists, or as it existed.
Dave Duffield and Aneel Bhusri founded Workday in 2005, after Oracle acquired PeopleSoft, the company Duffield had founded. The new firm sold human-resources and finance software as a service. A company no longer installed a system in its own basement. It rented the record of its own employees.
That record is why the 2060 chapter names Workday. If a workplace monitors people through software, the monitoring has to live somewhere, and for a large number of employers it already lives in the system that hires, pays, and reviews them.
The administrators
Workday's own staff are engineers and the consultants who configure a client's tenants, pay grades, and approval chains. The larger occupation is inside the client: the HR administrator whose fluency is the software, not a filing cabinet. A generation of personnel clerks retrained on the screen or left. The software company is small next to the clerks it standardized.
A tool, not a destiny
Workday is an independent public company. The 2060 chapter is a projection about who a specialist works for, the employee or the employer who bought the software. Workday is the present example of the second address. It is not evidence that the projection has already happened. It is evidence that the record of a working life already has a vendor.
The work it organized
- Software engineer
- Implementation consultant
- HR administrator
- Payroll specialist