Workday Inc CEO Aneel Bhusri

Workday Inc. has revealed plans to put together a suite of mobile-first analytic applications promising to infuse data smarts into the daily grind of financial and human resource professionals. The move follows rival Oracle Corp. introducing its own line of niche utilities designed to help enterprise employees become more effective in how they tackle the individual challenges that make up their workflows.

The upcoming Insight Apps from Workday will up the ante against the database maker, going above and beyond merely providing productivity features shaving a few seconds off a task here or there with advanced analytical capabilities spanning a wide range of use cases. The portfolio is meant to extend the human capital management powerhouse’s existing data crunching functionality, which provides visibility into past and current business activity but don’t offer too much in the way of the predictive capabilities decision-makers have come to expect.

That’s where Insight Apps are supposed to come in. Workday is promising that the upcoming solutions will draw on data from sources outside its portfolio to produce accurate recommendations on complex challenges such as mapping out the career path of a certain employee and identifying top performers at risk of jumping ship. Users, the company envisions, will also be able to directly take action on those tips inside its core human capital and financial management services, which are set to become fully integrated with Insight Apps.

For recruiters, Workday is planning to offer up an implementation of the technology it obtained through the acquisition of a startup called Identified Inc. earlier this year. According to the company, the offering will allow headhunters to organize candidates across different industries into neat taxonomies that eliminate terminology differences and other inconsistencies that may make it difficult to asset how qualified a person is for an opening.

Moreover, the software tweaks its algorithms with every new job description and resume added in to gradually automate more and more of the data normalization process, machine learning functionality that Workday also intends to implement in the rest of its Insight Apps. That includes the recommendations services, whose users will potentially stand to gain even more from continuously improving analytics.

Workday plans start rolling out the new applications in 2015.

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