Workday announced today that Robert Enslin, longtime enterprise software executive best known for his time at SAP before his more recent stints at Google Cloud and UIPath, will be joining Workday as their chief commercial officer.
I’ll be especially interested in seeing if this hire improves Workday’s positioning of its financial suite, where many of the sourcing, planning, and analytics pieces are there but Workday is still struggling to gain CFO mindshare and displace incumbents at the enterprise level.
And honestly, a lot of this is because Workday still approaches its business from an HR-first mindset that is clear when you look at their AI assistant announcements and partner announcements. it is not enough to just say “HR and finance” instead of HR in press releases when the actual products are still focused on talent management and individuals.
I would love to see Workday focus more on the office of the CFO and the idea of talent-and-skills based finance or finance for the innovation-based business, which requires talent and subject matter expertise. These are areas where traditional monolithic ERPs struggle and where smaller finance startups lack visibility to employee skills. Perhaps an analyst firm or consulting firm that Workday listens to will bring this up somewhere down the road.
Or perhaps Rob Enslin will get to flex the skills and positioning that he showed at SAP to push Workday forward into being a true enterprise software player rather than the HR specialist it is best known for being. The products are there, the roadmap and integrations are mostly in place, and the partnership intentions are there. Now for the go-to-market to solidify and for Workday Finance to be more than a me-too add-on.