Worktags in Workday

Worktags are keywords assigned to business events, so Workday customers can aggregate, report, and analyze their business information within Workday. One example: An employee fills out a purchase order (an event), which can be assigned any number of tags, such as the name of the person making the purchase and the project it’s for. A tag could also be a department, customer, product, supplier, or subsidiary, while other types of events include a generated invoice, a submitted expense, or a payment received. The ability to tag these businesses attributes to events—either at the time they occur or a later date if needed—is the building block in providing Workdays Financial Management customers with a complete, multi-dimensional picture of their operations.

Workday recognized tagging as something that comes naturally to people as a way to categorize “stuff” so they can find it again, and got to work to see if they could apply it to the enterprise cloud. The result was Worktags, a way to categorize business “stuff.”

Worktags have been core to Workday Financial Management ever since. Workday customers can configure many types of Worktags and easily change them as business needs evolve. Different departments can use different sets of tags—services may want to understand spend or revenue by facility or by customer, while marketing is looking to analyze spend by campaign, product, or region—so they can create management reports and analyses that are relevant to them, directly from their core financial management application. Worktags are hybrids that include the consumer concept of tagging with the necessary controls of enterprise systems. Workday refers Worktags as an “agile code block.” The result is that multi-dimensionality is inherent and organic in the data itself, delivering business intelligence straight from the source.

From Oracle EBS perspective worktags are like DFF in Oracle tables.

Reference: http://blogs.workday.com/story-of-worktags/