Q&A – Aviva Europe
- Reduce text size Decrease text size
- Increase text size Increase text size
- Print article Print
- Jump to comments Comment
- Share this article Share
- Email article to a friend Email
Insurance giant chose Workday over Oracle for its HR refresh
Page 3 of 3
Governance
Having decided upon Workday, how did you ensure the necessary security procedures were in place?
As an insurer, we are trained in the evaluation of risk. When we bring any provider in, they go through extremely rigorous security control. The group IT department was involved in making sure that, from a technical standpoint, Workday satisfied all of our fairly stringent requirements. We didn’t just take the safe harbour agreement as an acceptance that everything was covered.
Were there any concerns from employees about their data being hosted in the US?
Data protection was clearly an important issue for people, especially in the Czech Republic. Part of the reason we ran the pilot in those countries was the cultural and social needs there.
The way we addressed it was to be open. We told staff that Workday has a safe harbour provision, and explained how access to the data would be limited to a very small number of people. We wrote an agreement between Aviva International Holdings, which is the shareholder entity of the Czech division, and the local management. On an employee level we communicated, communicated, communicated.
Even so, in the Czech Republic we had five people who at first did not sign the release form. We agreed that we would temporarily take their data out of the system, and we had individual discussions with them. We also talked the employee representative, who sat on the supervisory board in the Czech Republic, through it and allowed her to represent them. Eventually, the individuals signed.
Deployment
How easy was the deployment, such as it has been so far?
We were pleasantly surprised at the ease with which we moved from requirements and concept into execution and fulfilment. We only needed one IT person in each region, on a part-time basis, to oversee the deployment. Based on the experience of our Danube region, we believe that we can deploy fully across Europe by the end of the year.
Outcomes
How has the Workday deployment been received?
The reception has been better than expected, and our managers and employees are becoming more familiar with the tool.
What do you expect some of the longer-term benefits to be?
When Andrea came in as CEO of the region [in 2008], the first question he asked me was, “How many people do we have in Europe, where are they and which function do they perform?” It’s a simple question, but it took three weeks of work, probably hundreds of phone calls and different interpretations of data along the way before eventually I gave him an answer in which I had about 80% confidence.
Now there is a common definition of job roles and a common language, we are already seeing our ability to capture management information improve.
The second benefit will be employees feeling that they own their own data. That shifts the culture towards managers being more empowered to resolve and access information. This means that the headcount of our HR function won’t change massively, but the skills we have will be more strategically involved. In future, I will have more organisational effectiveness resources than I will have transaction processing people. It shifts HR up the value curve, to use the jargon.
And when do you expect to get a return on investment?
Anything I wanted to change as part of this European transformation had to pay back in three years. Our Workday solution will pay back in less time than that.
