Workday takes aim at SA’s tech bottlenecks

South African companies are modernising HR, finance and talent systems at uneven speeds. Some are racing ahead with intelligent automation, while others are still wrestling with fragmented data and entrenched payroll setups. Workday sits at the centre of those realities, and Kiv Moodley, its South Africa country MD, sees the friction points up close.

During the Workday Rising 2025 conference in Barcelona last week, he discussed the role Workday plays in resolving these frictions. The full interview follow.

Gadget: Before we get into the detail, give us your background.

Moodley: I have been in the technology industry for roughly about 24 years. I worked for an IBM partner called Maxtec for just over six years. I spent 12 years at both Oracle and SAP, and I’ve been at Workday now for seven years. I’ve been the country MD for the last four years.

Gadget: What do South African companies still misunderstand about Workday?

Moodley: We’ve managed to work with our existing customers, prospective customers, our partners and our team, and we’ve tailored a value proposition that’s suited for the South African market. We didn’t just take a global model and think about the wording of the solution. We spent a lot of time to think about what is needed in South Africa and built a strategy and the go-to-market around that.

Gadget: What pain points do you solve most often for local organisations?

Moodley: Many organisations today, even though they have technology in place, have technology that is potentially legacy and very disjointed, so data is very fragmented, which doesn’t result in decision making being done in real time. It doesn’t result in executives having the confidence in making decisions, and the net result is companies not being agile and being able to grow and pivot fast enough.

Gadget: When companies modernise finance and HR, where do they feel the impact first?

Moodley: A recipe for a successful project is a great executive sponsor, really good project governance, change management thought of upfront, looking at the rolling adoption, and having a business case that touches on tangible, measurable business results. It’s something we as Workday do as part of our offering.

We engage with them on a five-year business case on what the perceived value of Workday could be. A year after they go live, we come back and we measure that, and we work with them to establish why we overshot these KPIs or how to improve on others.

Gadget: You target the mid-market too. How is the SA mid-market different?

Moodley: Companies with an employee size larger than 3,500 are large enterprise, and below that are medium. Between 70% to 75% of our global customers are actually in the medium enterprise space. In South Africa, in particular, when we look at medium enterprise businesses, there is definitely a difference compared to a medium enterprise company in the UK. Their maturity is different, their revenues are much higher, very similar to large organisations.

We’ve had to work with our partners to adapt the way we deploy our product, to make sure it’s on time, on budget, and in terms of scope, something the maturity of a client within that size or industry is able to consume.

Gadget: What challenges come with that?

Moodley: The challenges will always be making sure we are addressing a real problem within an organisation and that the problem is real enough that it can derive value. We take a lot of time upfront with a prospect to make sure that before they become a client, they are ready; that the timing is right for them, that they have the right teams in place, that they’ve thought through the project, the change management, the governance, the project sponsor. We evaluate the risk upfront and build a solid plan that’s going to lead to success.

Gadget: How do SA organisations think about cloud HR and finance tools given infrastructure issues?

Moodley: We’ve never had resistance from any prospect based on the cloud computing potential of Workday. They still ask the traditional questions – where is data hosted, how many servers might be required – and we take them through the journey that it’s SaaS. It’s true SaaS. We get into security and how the data is modelled within Workday. Then they see the value proposition that they’re getting this as a service.

We now have global partnerships with Amazon and Google Cloud, so we have that option for South African customers as well.

Gadget: Did load shedding affect Workday performance in South Africa?

Moodley: Because our data is hosted in Europe, there was no impact. For local users there was no impact, because everything was hosted in Europe.

Gadget: What digital skills gaps do you see during deployments?

Moodley: Prior to 2018, not many organisations or individuals knew about Workday as a skill set. Today, amongst the customers and partners we have, we have so many certifications. We have so many individuals that have built a career on Workday. Certified consultants on Workday work on South African projects and global projects that would not have happened in the last seven years if we weren’t in the country.

Gadget: What do CIOs most overestimate about their AI readiness?

Moodley: The overestimation possibly comes from thinking the technology and the data is ready. The foundational pillar is making sure that you have the data ready. Whether you’re a small company in Johannesburg or a leading organisation in Silicon Valley, it’s the same platform: not a different version, not a different tenant. And that’s where the potential is.

Gadget: Payroll remains a big sticking point. How do you address that?

Moodley: We leverage our payroll partners. We have an interoperable payroll platform that allows our customers to use existing payroll providers or payroll providers that are part of Workday. You could have millions of employees, hundreds of countries, hundreds of different payrolls, but one global view, and that’s still the core strength we do have.

Gadget: Workday now calls South Africa its springboard into Africa. What does that mean in practice?

Moodley: We have been very selective and intentional around the countries we’ve opened up. Our go-to-market has been predominantly on South Africa because of the demand of the global customers and local customers we had. We are now doing due diligence with our partners to understand which countries in Africa we could possibly expand into, and which ones have the highest pain points and requirements based on an industry fit.

South African customers speak to each other all the time. As they communicate and speak, that allows our community to grow as well.

Gadget: One piece of advice to SA executives preparing their people for an AI-enabled workplace?

Moodley: AI is embedded in everything that we do. There has to be a strategy that you can embrace it and at the same time curate it within an enterprise level. It’s not something that can be avoided. Embrace it, fail, fail fast, and look at the use cases that make sense for the business, and build a business case around that.

* Arthur Goldstuck is CEO of World Wide Worx, editor-in-chief of Gadget.co.za, and author of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to AI – The African Edge”.