Discover Workday at RISD

Each March and September, Workday releases an upgraded version of their software.

Each release provides new functionality, fixes known bugs and enhances the overall user experience. Workday 2024R1 is the next such upgrade.

Workday will be upgraded with this release on Saturday, March 9th and will not be accessible from 2AM until 10AM ET.

Contact the IT Service Desk with any concerns or questions: (401) 454-6106 or servicedesk@risd.edu.

We launched Workday in April 2019 to serve as our human resources and financial information system to modernize and standardize the way RISD delivers key services to our community. Students start using Workday to register for classes in May 2023. Faculty will start using Workday for advising, class rosters and grading in Summer 2023. View the project timeline.

In line with RISD’s strategic planning initiative, Workday is an “enabling system” built to remain continuously modern and take advantage of best practices in the processes critical to how we operate as an organization.

Workday’s features will help RISD to enable and foster a culture of integrated and collaborative working by:

• providing real-time access to accurate information for decision making across academic and administrative areas
• minimizing administrative overhead for faculty and staff by replacing paper and manual workflows
• allowing employees to enable workflow and business processes without reliance on coding by ITS staff
• reducing operating costs and minimizing security, compliance and accessibility risks through cloud hosting and a modern software architecture
• leveraging a single codebase for more efficient product updates and third-party integrations
• increasing communication and visibility and improving user experiences across tasks

The decision to invest in Workday was not taken lightly, particularly with regard to our current enterprise resource system, Ellucian Colleague. Ongoing customization to Colleague over the past three decades has added layers of complexity, making upgrades disruptive and impeding RISD’s momentum in administrative and operational areas.

RISD has contracted a firm for expert guidance as we implement Workday and prepare our community to take advantage of its offerings. We are proud to be working with Alchemy, our solutions, integration and change management partner.

This site will be an ongoing resource for the RISD community, providing up-to-date information about the Workday implementation. Over the coming year, the Workday Organizational Change & Training (OC&T) Team will publish more detailed reference guides and video tutorials for using Workday. We welcome your feedback about how to make the site as helpful as possible. Please submit thoughts or questions via this contact form.