Employee Skill Sync Integration with Workday

This Deployment Guide provides instructions that will assist in the process of deploying the Workday to/from TechWolf Skills Integration, including detail on the configuration and deployment of the integration in the customer’s Workday tenant. The intended audience for this document is the Integration Implementer.

Integration Overview

Integration

The Integration has been designed, developed, tested, documented, and deployed by TechWolf with Workday’s guidance and oversight. The integration facilitates the flow of data required between Workday and TechWolf Skills or specific use case(s) and is not intended to address all use cases customers may be interested in. The customer benefits by receiving pre-built, pre-tested, documented, partner-maintained integrations that minimize implementer’s effort as compared to custom integrations for the specific use case(s) addressed.

Functional Objective

TechWolf and Workday are partnering to enhance skill management within organizations. TechWolf leverages data from various sources, including business systems like JIRA and Confluence, to infer skills. These inferred skills are seamlessly integrated into Workday skill profiles, providing a comprehensive and real-time view of employees' skills. The integration also enables profile synchronization between TechWolf and Workday, ensuring that both platforms' updates are consistently reflected.

This can be further facilitated within the familiar environment of MS Teams, where employees can either be notified of or validate newly suggested skills. This integration does not depend on the MS Teams Bot; any other skill validation approach can be used. The integration is agnostic to the skill validation.

Key benefits:

• TechWolf synchronizes employee skill profiles across all relevant systems, harmonizing skills across all systems.
• The accurate and up-to-date skills data in Workday can be used for downstream purposes in the system, e.g. Talent Marketplace and Learning.
• As TechWolf does not rely on manual assessments, we increase employee adoption to your talent marketplace with automated skill profiles.

Data Flow

• During the initial setup phase and when new skill vocabulary versions are released, TechWolf will push and update the external skill mapping in Workday.

• Worker Skills are synchronized in a bidirectional flow, where Worker skills data updates in the SkillEngine API are synchronized in real-time to Workday using a push strategy.

  Skills synced by the Workday Integration are tracked using the source field in the Employee Skill Profile Feedback endpoint payload, tagged as "workday-integration". To retrieve these sources in an employee's profile, use the query parameter &include=sources, which returns the Skill's source_event with "event_type": "skill_profile_feedback" and "source": "workday-integration".

• Workday updates are synced at regular intervals to the SkillEngine API using a pull strategy. This means that all flows are all initiated by TechWolf. The frequency by which Workday skills are synchronized to TechWolf is every 2 hours.

In summary: TechWolf will access Workday’s Talent and Staffing Web services to retrieve and update skills data. TechWolf also synchronizes skills data from external sources and skills from external systems performing skill harmonization.

System Requirements

The TechWolf skills integration will make use of existing Workday functionality. The customer will need a TechWolf contract with a live TechWolf tenant.

This TechWolf tenant must be populated with (a subset of) the worker’s entities in Workday.

Workday Configuration

A Workday integration user must be configured in the Workday tenant with an implementation security group. Requests will be sent over HTTPS using username/password authentication for the SOAP API.

1. Create Integration System User (ISU)

   • Create Integration System User business process.
   • Do not allow UI sessions as this user will only be used for automations.
   • The username and password of this user must be shared with TechWolf as it will be used to access specific WWS endpoints.
   • Note: Make sure to share the secrets through a secure channel.

2. Update password expiration rules for ISU

   • In the Maintain Password Rules business process under “System Users exempt from password expiration” add the newly created ISU to the list.
   • Note: This ensures the integrations will keep running without interruptions due to password expiration.

3. Set up security permissions for the ISU through security policies

   • Go to Create Security Group, choose “Integration System Security Group”.
   • You can choose between “(Constrained)” or “(Unconstrained)”.
   • Note on acceptance testing: Consider using two different security groups, one Unconstrained and one Constrained. This way, the test-set is scoped while the correct permissions are applied for other Web Services.
   • The next screen presents you with an Edit form to add additional information. Add your ISU to the list. This can be changed later too. Don’t check “Inactive”.

4. Edit the Security Group’s domain security policies

   • Search for “View Security Group” and select your created security group.
   • Select the option menu next to the Security Group’s name, go to “Security Group” and select “Maintain Domain Permissions for Security Group”.
   • Under Integration Permissions add the following Domain Security Policies, and run the Activate Pending Security Policy Changes task to apply the changes.

5. Find out the correct Workday API URL

   • Search for Public Web Services in the search bar at the top of the Workday home page.
   • In the list, click the three dots next to the Human Resources (public) entry. select View WSDL under Web Service.
   • The resulting page will take some time to load. Once it is loaded, look for "soapbind:address location" near the bottom of the page and copy the URL you find next to it.
   • Note that the API URL can differ between implementation tenants and production tenants, so the steps described above need to be repeated for each tenant individually.

When the Integration System User credentials and Workday API URL are shared, the setup is complete on the customer’s Workday tenant. TechWolf will validate that the ISU has the required permissions and that the API URL is correct.

TechWolf Configuration

The TechWolf tenant will be configured by TechWolf itself.

1. In the integration service on the TechWolf side, TechWolf adds the credentials of the customer-created ISU.
2. TechWolf adds TechWolf API credentials with correct scopes to have access to the TechWolf API and links that TechWolf tenant to a Workday tenant.
3. In communication with the customer, TechWolf or the customer inserts Employees into the TechWolf API, corresponding to the Workday Workers to which the integration is scoped.

Deployment Methodology

The following tasks and responsibilities assume that:

1. The customer has the appropriate TechWolf API license(s).
2. The TechWolf API contains all employee information corresponding to Workday workers and data from other external systems.
3. A skill profile validation tool (e.g., MS Teams bot) is set up and configured (see separate deployment guide).

Deployment Tasks & Responsibilities

1. Customer: Create Integration System User (ISU) based on workflow described above.
2. Customer: Share ISU credentials with TechWolf.
3. Customer: Share Workday API URL with TechWolf.
4. TechWolf: Run initial sync of worker profiles with TechWolf API.
5. TechWolf: Setup tenant configuration and start bidirectional sync process.
6. Customer: Check end-user test scenarios.

Customer / User Acceptance Testing

Tests will be conducted on the production environment using a constrained Integration System Security Group. The Security Group should be constrained to the select number of workers that will perform the user acceptance testing.

An overview of the acceptance tests can be found in the “Test Scenarios” Excel - "Testing as an end-user" sheet.

To promote the configuration to production, an unconstrained Integration System Security Group should be created and added to the ISU. This allows TechWolf to read and update all worker skill profiles.

User acceptance testing is done on the production or sandbox tenant, with a constrained security group.

Integration Process Flow

Initial Load

The initial load occurs after the Workday Integration System User credentials are shared and set up in TechWolf.

The TechWolf team ensures the initial batch of data is loaded into both systems, starting a process on TechWolf's side.

Worker profile of Grayson Rogers before the initial load:

Assuming a lot of skills have been validated already, we get his profile after the initial sync:

In TechWolf, we see the same profile as before, with the addition of the skills that were in Grayson's original Workday profile; these are now validated in TechWolf.

Skill Validation in TechWolf

Grayson Rogers validates the skill "Acoustic Modelling" in TechWolf. This validation is pushed to Workday immediately:

Skill Validation in Workday

When an employee provides feedback in Workday, for example, adds "Facilities Operations" and removes "Performance Management", the changes are reflected in TechWolf accordingly. The changes are synchronized every 2 hours, so not immediately in this direction.

Linking Workday & TechWolf

This section is only required if the customer is NOT using the Workday ID as the API ID in TechWolf.

Seamless Matching of Employee IDs

A critical aspect of this process is the seamless coupling of employee IDs across both platforms: TechWolf (aligned with API IDs) and Workday (using Workday IDs).

Creating Custom Properties

• For each employee in the TechWolf system, introduce a new custom property such as employee_workday_id. This property will store the corresponding Workday ID of the employee.
• Detailed instructions for creating new custom property definitions can be found here.

Setting Custom Property Values

• Once the custom property is defined, assign the Workday ID to each employee's TechWolf profile.
• Steps for setting these values are outlined here.

During a pilot phase, it is possible to manually establish a link between TechWolf IDs and Workday IDs for each employee. While this approach is feasible for a limited scope, it lacks scalability for broader deployment.

Important Information

Software Partner API Versioning

To minimize the impact on Customers, Software Partners, and Workday, Workday Software Alliances only requires Software Partners to update API versions in their integrations when not doing so will result in meaningful impact on a current or future Customer. Given that Workday’s approach to API updates expects that updates are backward compatible (with few exceptions), API version updates are rarely required for a previously badged integration.

However, Workday reserves the right to require a partner to update an integration to the latest API version if the current version is negatively impacting a joint customer or is resulting in unnecessary support and/or maintenance effort. We also strongly encourage partners to take the opportunity when making other updates to their integration to also move to the latest version of any API’s leveraged.

Reference Material

Reference materials and documentation can be found at:

• TechWolf developer documentation: https://developers.techwolf.ai/
• Workday x TechWolf field mapping matrics (on request).

• Used Workday Web Service operations:

  • Put_Skill_Vendor (Workday API)
  • Import_External_Skill (Workday API)
  • Import_External_Skill_Mapping (Workday API)
  • Get_External_Skill_Mapping (Workday API)
  • Manage_Skills (Workday API)
  • Get_Workers (Workday API)

Glossary of Terms

• Certified Integration: An integration system developed by TechWolf that enables the data flow between Workday and TechWolf. Certification is achieved after meeting all requirements from Workday.
• Configurable Security Policy: The Configurable Security Policy describes the access required for each Integration System User and permissions needed for the integration to function.
• Integration Implementer(s): The individual or group of individuals responsible for deploying the integration. Workday generally recommends that the customer engage the appropriate Workday Certified Consultants when deploying any integration.
• SkillEngine API: The TechWolf API. This is the TechWolf system where skills data is stored, calculated, and used for related skills functionality. Interaction works through the REST API.
• Skill Profile: The set of skills of an Employee.
• Customer Skill Sources: Implies all customer platforms, integrations, and data that can serve as a source of skill information. Think of learning platforms, Workday itself, and even systems like Jira and Confluence.