Tech That Talks to Customers

Aligning IT with Customer Outcomes

Workday, a leading provider of enterprise cloud applications for finance and human capital management, has always focused on customer satisfaction. But as the company grew and its platform became increasingly complex, it faced a common challenge in the enterprise software world: ensuring that internal IT operations supported the business and directly contributed to better customer outcomes.

Like many high-growth SaaS companies, Workday's internal systems were initially built for agility and scale. However, they were primarily inward-facing and optimized for efficiency, not necessarily for enhancing the external customer experience. The risk wasn’t failure; it was gradual disconnection. While the product team focused on designing customer-facing features, internal IT was mainly perceived as a support function detached from the customer journey.

In 2016, Diana McKenzie stepped into the role of Workday’s first Global CIO. With her background in the highly regulated and customer-focused life sciences industry, McKenzie brought a unique perspective to the role: “At Workday being a customer facing CIO, my responsibility was to help develop the ecosystem of CIOs who would advocate for Workday.” Her insights would drive a multi-year transformation that reshaped how IT contributed to the company’s growth and customer success.

Shortcomings of Traditional IT Approaches

Before McKenzie's leadership, Workday's IT organization shared many traits with traditional enterprise setups. Internal stakeholders, including HR, finance, and sales, were the primary “customers” for IT. Projects were scoped around operational efficiency, not customer experience.

Their operations were fragmented, with different teams using different systems, data pipelines inconsistently integrated, and internal tools lacking visibility into the full customer lifecycle. While Workday could access vast usage and behavioral data, it wasn’t fully leveraged to predict or enhance customer satisfaction.

Projects were initiated to solve immediate problems or implement executive requests rather than proactively enabling long-term customer-focused outcomes. This model worked when Workday was smaller and scaling fast. However, as its client base expanded across industries and geographies, the limitations of this approach became increasingly apparent.

Implementing a Customer-Focused IT Strategy

Diana McKenzie set out to reframe IT’s identity within Workday from a back-office function to a customer-centric enabler of innovation. Her strategy was rooted in aligning technology decisions with customer success metrics and elevating IT as a co-driver of external outcomes.

McKenzie’s team began by challenging a foundational assumption: who is IT really serving? This shift prompted IT to work backward from the external customer experience—what they see, feel, and need—rather than just building tools to meet internal requests. IT began collaborating more closely with customer success, product, and marketing teams to better understand pain points and opportunities along the customer journey.

Projects were no longer approved solely based on business case ROI or internal demand. Instead, they were mapped to customer outcomes. For example, would a new internal dashboard reduce the time to resolve customer issues? Would an AI model that predicts infrastructure strain result in less downtime during peak usage periods? This change encouraged IT to prioritize initiatives directly tied to net promoter scores (NPS) improvements, feature adoption, or renewal likelihood.

McKenzie pushed to form integrated project teams that brought together members from IT, product, customer success, and support. These teams worked on initiatives like onboarding automation, real-time support analytics, and usage visibility dashboards. The result was faster iteration cycles, shared accountability, and consistent alignment around customer-facing goals.

Workday began leveraging its own platform to pilot AI and machine learning capabilities internally. AI was used to predict and preempt internal system issues that could affect service delivery, analyze customer usage patterns, detect drops in engagement, and provide contextual help to employees interfacing with customer data or resolving support tickets.

As an executive team member, McKenzie ensured that IT had a seat at the table in product launches, customer experience initiatives, and operational planning. This helped close the loop between internal systems and the external experience, ensuring that no significant product change went live without IT readiness to support it at scale.

Measurable Impact and Results

The transformation from internally focused IT to a customer-oriented innovation driver led to tangible improvements across Workday’s business. The company improved NPS scores and reduced support escalations by proactively identifying and solving friction points in the customer journey. Integrated AI-powered analytics enabled real-time triage of technical issues, allowing support teams to resolve customer concerns faster.

The cross-functional collaboration led to automation tools that accelerated new customer onboarding and helped professional services teams deliver value sooner. IT employees reported higher job satisfaction and a sense of purpose as their work was more directly tied to customer-facing results.

Data integration and workflow automation reduced redundant tools, saving time and cost across the organization. These results solidified IT’s position as a strategic lever within Workday, not just for scaling operations but also for helping customers.

Lessons Learned and Future Outlook

Diana’s approach offers a valuable blueprint for CIOs and enterprise leaders seeking to transform IT from a cost center into a customer experience engine:

• Your True Customer May Be External: Even when IT serves internal stakeholders, its ultimate responsibility may be to enable the company’s relationship with end users.
• Technology Is a Means, Not an End: Projects should be evaluated by improving the customer experience, not just how they modernize internal systems.
• Break the Silos to Speed the Loop: Customer outcomes accelerate when products, IT, support, and operations work together.
• AI Can Amplify the Human Touch: Deployed responsibly, AI enhances employee decision-making and helps create frictionless, predictive customer journeys.

Workday’s success wasn’t just about deploying AI or streamlining workflows. It was about elevating IT to its rightful role as a strategic partner in creating value for customers, proving that a customer-facing CIO is no longer a novelty, but a necessity.