Your Core HCM Lead Gets Hit by a Bus. What Happens Next?
Everyone came back from Rising chasing AI. But AI can’t run on folklore. Without a system to capture your Workday team's tribal knowledge...your tenant is one resignation away from chaos.
At Workday Rising this year, a Director of HRIS told me something I can’t forget.
Half-joking, she said: “If my Core HCM lead — who’s owned the module for four years — got hit by a bus, I don’t know what I’d do.”
The room laughed. But no one really thought it was a joke. Everyone knew she had just admitted the truth: most Workday tenants are one departure away from chaos.
1. The Fragility We Don’t Admit
Every Workday customer runs on tribal knowledge. Not on documentation. Not on systems. On people.
Turnover is structural, not hypothetical. In 2019, attrition in the HRIS/IT sector was already the highest of any industry. By 2022, IT and SaaS admin roles were seeing 20–25% attrition. HR professionals themselves reported 27% intent to leave in 2023.
For Workday leaders, that math is brutal. When your Core HCM lead leaves, you don’t replace them in weeks. On average, it takes over four months to hire a qualified admin and another three to onboard. Without documentation, onboarding can stretch even longer. That means every departure is half a year of disruption.
This is the hidden fragility in every tenant: your most critical processes live in the heads of a few overextended people.
2. Documentation Debt Is the Silent Killer
The real killer isn’t turnover. It’s documentation debt.
Every time someone leaves, undocumented knowledge disappears. Companies bleed billions from this — a 2024 IDC report found companies lose $31.5 billion annually from poor knowledge sharing. A 1,000-employee company cited wasting $2.4 million a year just searching through their fragmented documentation for answers.
Workday teams feel it more than most. When a veteran leaves, integrations break. Reports stop balancing. Manual workarounds vanish. And the replacement is left to piece together the tenant by trial and error.
Documentation debt compounds like interest. Every undocumented process you ignore today costs three times as much to rediscover tomorrow.
3. Why Test "Automation" Still Feels Manual
Executives want fully automated test automation. Faster regression cycles. Safer releases. Resilience.
But anyone who has lived through a Workday release knows the truth: true test automation without documentation is theater.
The numbers prove it. NTT Data’s 2025 analysis found that 70–85% of GenAI and automation deployments fail to meet expectations. And they don’t collapse because the tools are bad — they collapse because enterprises lack a real-time source of truth about how their applications are configured and what people have actually done inside them.
If the only source of truth is in one admin’s memory, your regression suite isn’t testing reality. It’s testing folklore. That’s why scripts fail, budgets blow up, and automation ROI never arrives.
Automation isn’t broken. Documentation is.
4. The AI Future Requires Tribal Knowledge Capture
At Workday Rising this year AI was on every stage and in every hallway conversation. Everyone wants to know when they will be able to open their phone, give AI a single prompt, go to bed, and wake up to the most detailed test results they have ever seen from an AI that has run through every edge case in their system, captured every issue, along with suggested fixes better than the best Workday consultant they've ever hired.
That vision is real. It is coming. But here is the uncomfortable truth: AI cannot run on folklore. It can only run on context.
If your tenant’s tribal knowledge is not captured, every process, every dependency, every nuance, then when the AI runs it will hallucinate. It will not test your organization’s reality. It will test a guess.
To unlock the promise of AI in Workday you need a tenant that tells its own story. Tribal knowledge must be captured in real time as your team works. Without it, AI is theatre. With it, AI finally has the context to execute your processes as if your best admin were standing over its shoulder.
I am excited that the team at Mando is hard at work building toward this future. A system that quietly sits in the background, turning daily activity in the tenant into a living system of record that never goes stale and never walks out the door. The leaders who build that foundation will not be waiting for AI promises to materialize. Their teams will move faster, extract more value from every release, and operate with the most modern digital systems available. They will be in meetings showing their executives that the applications they manage are delivering real returns. Everyone else will be in meetings explaining why their systems never delivered what was promised.
At Workday Rising this year, a Director of HRIS told me something I can’t forget.
Half-joking, she said: “If my Core HCM lead — who’s owned the module for four years — got hit by a bus, I don’t know what I’d do.”
The room laughed. But no one really thought it was a joke. Everyone knew she had just admitted the truth: most Workday tenants are one departure away from chaos.
1. The Fragility We Don’t Admit
Every Workday customer runs on tribal knowledge. Not on documentation. Not on systems. On people.
Turnover is structural, not hypothetical. In 2019, attrition in the HRIS/IT sector was already the highest of any industry. By 2022, IT and SaaS admin roles were seeing 20–25% attrition. HR professionals themselves reported 27% intent to leave in 2023.
For Workday leaders, that math is brutal. When your Core HCM lead leaves, you don’t replace them in weeks. On average, it takes over four months to hire a qualified admin and another three to onboard. Without documentation, onboarding can stretch even longer. That means every departure is half a year of disruption.
This is the hidden fragility in every tenant: your most critical processes live in the heads of a few overextended people.
2. Documentation Debt Is the Silent Killer
The real killer isn’t turnover. It’s documentation debt.
Every time someone leaves, undocumented knowledge disappears. Companies bleed billions from this — a 2024 IDC report found companies lose $31.5 billion annually from poor knowledge sharing. A 1,000-employee company cited wasting $2.4 million a year just searching through their fragmented documentation for answers.
Workday teams feel it more than most. When a veteran leaves, integrations break. Reports stop balancing. Manual workarounds vanish. And the replacement is left to piece together the tenant by trial and error.
Documentation debt compounds like interest. Every undocumented process you ignore today costs three times as much to rediscover tomorrow.
3. Why Test "Automation" Still Feels Manual
Executives want fully automated test automation. Faster regression cycles. Safer releases. Resilience.
But anyone who has lived through a Workday release knows the truth: true test automation without documentation is theater.
The numbers prove it. NTT Data’s 2025 analysis found that 70–85% of GenAI and automation deployments fail to meet expectations. And they don’t collapse because the tools are bad — they collapse because enterprises lack a real-time source of truth about how their applications are configured and what people have actually done inside them.
If the only source of truth is in one admin’s memory, your regression suite isn’t testing reality. It’s testing folklore. That’s why scripts fail, budgets blow up, and automation ROI never arrives.
Automation isn’t broken. Documentation is.
4. The AI Future Requires Tribal Knowledge Capture
At Workday Rising this year AI was on every stage and in every hallway conversation. Everyone wants to know when they will be able to open their phone, give AI a single prompt, go to bed, and wake up to the most detailed test results they have ever seen from an AI that has run through every edge case in their system, captured every issue, along with suggested fixes better than the best Workday consultant they've ever hired.
That vision is real. It is coming. But here is the uncomfortable truth: AI cannot run on folklore. It can only run on context.
If your tenant’s tribal knowledge is not captured, every process, every dependency, every nuance, then when the AI runs it will hallucinate. It will not test your organization’s reality. It will test a guess.
To unlock the promise of AI in Workday you need a tenant that tells its own story. Tribal knowledge must be captured in real time as your team works. Without it, AI is theatre. With it, AI finally has the context to execute your processes as if your best admin were standing over its shoulder.
I am excited that the team at Mando is hard at work building toward this future. A system that quietly sits in the background, turning daily activity in the tenant into a living system of record that never goes stale and never walks out the door. The leaders who build that foundation will not be waiting for AI promises to materialize. Their teams will move faster, extract more value from every release, and operate with the most modern digital systems available. They will be in meetings showing their executives that the applications they manage are delivering real returns. Everyone else will be in meetings explaining why their systems never delivered what was promised.
At Workday Rising this year, a Director of HRIS told me something I can’t forget.
Half-joking, she said: “If my Core HCM lead — who’s owned the module for four years — got hit by a bus, I don’t know what I’d do.”
The room laughed. But no one really thought it was a joke. Everyone knew she had just admitted the truth: most Workday tenants are one departure away from chaos.
1. The Fragility We Don’t Admit
Every Workday customer runs on tribal knowledge. Not on documentation. Not on systems. On people.
Turnover is structural, not hypothetical. In 2019, attrition in the HRIS/IT sector was already the highest of any industry. By 2022, IT and SaaS admin roles were seeing 20–25% attrition. HR professionals themselves reported 27% intent to leave in 2023.
For Workday leaders, that math is brutal. When your Core HCM lead leaves, you don’t replace them in weeks. On average, it takes over four months to hire a qualified admin and another three to onboard. Without documentation, onboarding can stretch even longer. That means every departure is half a year of disruption.
This is the hidden fragility in every tenant: your most critical processes live in the heads of a few overextended people.
2. Documentation Debt Is the Silent Killer
The real killer isn’t turnover. It’s documentation debt.
Every time someone leaves, undocumented knowledge disappears. Companies bleed billions from this — a 2024 IDC report found companies lose $31.5 billion annually from poor knowledge sharing. A 1,000-employee company cited wasting $2.4 million a year just searching through their fragmented documentation for answers.
Workday teams feel it more than most. When a veteran leaves, integrations break. Reports stop balancing. Manual workarounds vanish. And the replacement is left to piece together the tenant by trial and error.
Documentation debt compounds like interest. Every undocumented process you ignore today costs three times as much to rediscover tomorrow.
3. Why Test "Automation" Still Feels Manual
Executives want fully automated test automation. Faster regression cycles. Safer releases. Resilience.
But anyone who has lived through a Workday release knows the truth: true test automation without documentation is theater.
The numbers prove it. NTT Data’s 2025 analysis found that 70–85% of GenAI and automation deployments fail to meet expectations. And they don’t collapse because the tools are bad — they collapse because enterprises lack a real-time source of truth about how their applications are configured and what people have actually done inside them.
If the only source of truth is in one admin’s memory, your regression suite isn’t testing reality. It’s testing folklore. That’s why scripts fail, budgets blow up, and automation ROI never arrives.
Automation isn’t broken. Documentation is.
4. The AI Future Requires Tribal Knowledge Capture
At Workday Rising this year AI was on every stage and in every hallway conversation. Everyone wants to know when they will be able to open their phone, give AI a single prompt, go to bed, and wake up to the most detailed test results they have ever seen from an AI that has run through every edge case in their system, captured every issue, along with suggested fixes better than the best Workday consultant they've ever hired.
That vision is real. It is coming. But here is the uncomfortable truth: AI cannot run on folklore. It can only run on context.
If your tenant’s tribal knowledge is not captured, every process, every dependency, every nuance, then when the AI runs it will hallucinate. It will not test your organization’s reality. It will test a guess.
To unlock the promise of AI in Workday you need a tenant that tells its own story. Tribal knowledge must be captured in real time as your team works. Without it, AI is theatre. With it, AI finally has the context to execute your processes as if your best admin were standing over its shoulder.
I am excited that the team at Mando is hard at work building toward this future. A system that quietly sits in the background, turning daily activity in the tenant into a living system of record that never goes stale and never walks out the door. The leaders who build that foundation will not be waiting for AI promises to materialize. Their teams will move faster, extract more value from every release, and operate with the most modern digital systems available. They will be in meetings showing their executives that the applications they manage are delivering real returns. Everyone else will be in meetings explaining why their systems never delivered what was promised.