Workday scales trusted data products across business communities through Huwise data marketplace

Our issue was that getting trusted, unified answers to simple business questions was very inefficient. Data was in silos and there were close to 1,000 dashboards used across the organization. Different functions were spending a lot of time reconciling each other’s data, and our legacy technology was not ready for AI.

As we planned how to share our data more seamlessly, we focused on a high level “North Star” – our project had to deliver a LinkedIn-style experience around data, including data products, for our 10,000 strong analytics community. We needed to move from a data catalog with millions of technical assets to a marketplace with curated, high value data products for all business users. We chose to work with Huwise, selecting its data marketplace platform to underpin our journey thanks to its flexible, scalable and customizable technology.

Our data marketplace is built on four pillars:

• One single enterprise data entry point, making it the exclusive destination to drive engagement and curate insight.
• Discovery & search of certified products, enabling users to find governed, certified and verified datasets with ease.
• Persona-based experience where the entire navigation adapts dynamically and is curated to the profile and specific needs of each user.
• Community capabilities, providing a collaborative “social” layer where we post questions, peer reviews, and insights about specific data assets.

The importance of trust and community

We knew that user trust is not something to be added at the end of the project. Instead, we focused on trust as a foundation that was designed-in from day one, combining a community-led approach for business users and ensuring data had sufficient context for AI agents. 

Trust begins by understanding our users and delivering on their requirements. We therefore looked in-depth at both our data consumers and data producers to create a range of personas, embedding their needs into the architecture of the data marketplace. The groups are:

• Consumers: business users/executives, business data analysts, and functional/cross-functional teams
• Producers: analytics engineers, data engineers, data scientists, BI developers, data governance stewards

Importantly, these are spread across different communities & data domains – Sales & Marketing, CX, Finance, Product & Technology, and HR/Legal. Each of these groups has its own language around data, its own definitions, terminology, and business cycles, which need to be factored into their experience. 

Enabling collaboration around data

We want the marketplace to be a thriving collaboration space. To deliver this we’ve incorporated powerful community capabilities. We have communities organized by data domains where people can post questions, answers, and share articles and showcase items. This means that there is one place that people in that global community can visit for curated, relevant information.

Backing this up is our data discussion feature. The goal here is to move many of the discussions that are happening offline or through emails and Slack onto the marketplace with community administrators validating and certifying the content. This will ensure that all of this knowledge is captured and is accessible for us to study, analyze and make available to our larger community. This helps reinforce collaboration and underlying trust in numbers.

As it accelerates on its data transformation journey, Workday relies on three key capabilities of the Huwise solution:

Intelligent, AI-driven search

Huwise’s AI-driven intelligent search features makes it easy for users to both find certified data analytics products, and also see what’s going on in their community. Natural language searches return relevant data products, analytics products, and AI agents that can help answer a question, or add information to a specific data product, alongside community news. Users can find relevant information faster, even when queries are imprecise or incomplete, improving efficiency and driving greater data consumption.

Customization flexibility

Engagement is central to ensuring that the platform is used by our entire analytics community. As well as enabling persona-based experiences, Huwise provides us with a powerful set of capabilities to customize the look and feel, content and navigation  of the marketplace to match our needs and brand design guidelines. Additionally, the built-in content management system (CMS) within Huwise helps maximize our team’s time, enabling us to create and upload content. 

Powerful connectors and partnerships

At Workday we have built a comprehensive AI-ready technology stack, including solutions from Snowflake, dbt, Fivetran, Tableau and Atlan. Thanks to its range of native connectors, Huwise allows us to automate data flows into the marketplace, particularly from our Atlan catalog and governance system. Beyond connectivity, Huwise helped us turn more than 10 million raw assets managed in Atlan into 75 curated, business-ready data products available through the marketplace. Huwise is an Atlan partner, which makes it seamless to link the two solutions and transfer data at scale.

We’re already seeing a wide range of benefits from the data marketplace and our partnership with Huwise.

Increased collaboration and community

Currently, the marketplace is in a pilot phase with about 100 users, with plans to scale to 1,000 by the end of 2026 and eventually to 4,500–10,000 users, targeting the sales, marketing, and finance teams within Workday. We currently have 75 data products within the marketplace, and expect this to grow over the coming months. We’ve curated this from over the diverse range of 3 million data assets we had before. We’re already seeing greater collaboration amongst our teams and as we develop the solution, we’re expanding community engagement, based on user feedback.

Time savings and better decision-making

Previously data was stuck in silos, which meant that finding and verifying the right data was time-consuming and labor-intensive. Essentially, a task that should take one hour would end up taking eight, as users had to find who had produced the data, who it belonged to, and what it contained.  The data marketplace transforms this process, increasing productivity 8x and ensuring decisions are truly driven by the best available information.

A foundation for future AI innovation

Huwise is committed to increasing the use of AI, and the solution has a built-in MCP server to support agentic AI. As part of this, we’re adding conversational and analytics agents to the marketplace. This will allow users to easily search our products, bringing everything together, as well as respond to questions, show definitions, highlight what’s happening in the community, and to signpost users to the right information.