As higher education institutions accelerate their adoption of Workday to drive modernization and transformation, many quickly discover that managing a cloud platform is a fundamentally new game— one that demands agility, foresight, and a willingness to embrace rapid change. The cloud is not static; it’s a living, evolving environment—especially now, with the emergence of agentic AI reshaping what’s possible.

To thrive in this new landscape, institutions must move beyond legacy mindsets. Success now hinges on adapting to a faster release cadence, automating manual processes, and streamlining governance to seize new innovations as they emerge. Effective vendor management is no longer a check-the-box activity—it requires ongoing engagement, transparent communication, and vigilant monitoring of SLAs to ensure you’re getting the value you expect. In this environment, what happens after go-live is every bit as important as the implementation itself, if not more important considering these systems typically evolve over 10-15 years and outlast the people that originally deploy them.

The reality: most organizations will live with their systems for a decade or more. The actions you take in the first few years will define your trajectory for years to come. Without a clear roadmap for adopting new Workday releases and integrating agentic AI, or a robust change management program to drive alignment and adoption, you risk falling behind. And with staffing constraints more acute than ever, strategic reskilling, upskilling, and targeted resource augmentation are essential to avoid stagnation and unlock future value.

This is where Deloitte can help you lead, not just keep up. Our comprehensive Operate solution for higher education goes far beyond traditional application management. We offer release enablement, process optimization, governance acceleration, and change management support – all designed to help your institution not only keep pace with change, but set the pace. By partnering with Deloitte, you can transform your Workday investment into a true engine for innovation and long-term success. Don’t let your institution settle for the status quo. Take action now to ensure you’re not just ready for the future – you’re shaping it.

Unlocking Continuous Value and Innovative Post Go-Live

It is one thing to keep the lights on, but it is entirely another to use your Workday cloud solution to further your mission, make better decisions, and strategically redeploy scarce financial and human resources while driving continuous improvement and creating value. Tailored to your institution’s specific needs, our Operate services for higher education go far beyond break/fix maintenance to helping organizations to innovate and continuously improve. This includes fine-tuning your Workday HCM, Financials, and Student applications and developing a roadmap for uptaking releases and leveraging Workday’s ever-evolving GenAI and agentic AI features to streamline processes and create a more modern experience for students, faculty, and staff. 

With Deloitte Operate Services for Higher Education, you can:

• Strategically redeploy scarce resources. Overburdened resources can be redeployed to areas that create more value. Process owners can focus on high-priority business issues while Deloitte handles the day-to-day work of incident management. Long-term employees with valuable institutional knowledge can work hand-in-hand with specialists to create efficiencies. 
• Expedite release management. Many colleges and universities, whether public or private, struggle to keep pace with the regular cadence of new Workday releases. We can help you be more strategic about the uptake of new releases and help you innovate and enhance your systems as your organization grows and changes. 
• Stabilize faster. Deloitte is a premier Workday alliance partner. As such, we often have visibility into new releases and insight into Workday’s development roadmap. When combined with our library of proprietary accelerators and testing frameworks, we can help you reach a steady-state faster after go-live, thus reducing risk and shortening the path to results.
• Scale with agility. As the academic calendar dictates peaks and valleys of activity that require specialized skills, you can easily scale up or down, drawing upon Deloitte resources as necessary to handle the variations. 
• Build out an AI roadmap. Our AI specialists and industry leaders can guide you in selecting and implementing applicable Workday AI features, along with appropriate third-party AI applications and agents for use in a higher education setting and integrate them seamlessly into Workday’s platform.

Algonquin College: Fueling continuous improvement

Based in Ontario, Canada, Algonquin College is a publicly funded college, with annual enrollment of 50,000+ and campuses in three locations: Ottawa, Perth, and Pembroke. With Deloitte’s assistance, Algonquin recently embarked on a Workday-enabled transformation journey to improve the experiences of its learners and its employees. The first leg of the journey involved implementing Workday Financials, HCM and Payroll. The next leg transformed the school’s budgeting, planning and forecasting capabilities by implementing Workday Adaptive Planning. Today, Algonquin College is fully operational on its cross-platform Workday system, which it continues to evolve by leveraging Deloitte’s Operate Services for Higher Education. Read more on Algonquin College’s story here.

The Deloitte Difference

Deloitte Operate Services for Higher Education aims to embed continuous advantage by combining hard-to-source domain and industry talent, technology skillsets, and transformation know-how. Our differentiators include: