Getting the Foundation Data Model Right

An FDM update from Allison Holt and Thomas Schneeberger, Chart of Accounts/Foundation Model Co-Leads, Finance Strategic Transformation

Now that the Finance Strategic Transformation (FST) project is in Phase 3: Implementation, we’re acting on information gathered about the chart of accounts (COA) to inform design of the foundation data model (FDM), Workday’s term for COA. During the past month, we determined the worktags that we plan to use in the tenant, defined preliminary fund values, and decided how program, project, and activity will be used.

See the FDM page on the Community:
https://communityhub.virginia.edu/docs/DOC-1973

Through engagement sessions with the FDM group and follow-up sessions with the Business Officers Council and unit contacts, we’ve discussed how the program, project, and activity worktags might be used for future managerial reporting. 

We also launched the FDM Community Page to provide a location for our partners across the University to see updates on FDM topics and review user scenarios, proposed programs, and our outstanding items list. We encourage you to regularly review this site and provide feedback and additional scenarios as you think of them. As we progress through phase 3 and begin working in the tenant, it will be critical that we capture user stories from across the organization to model and test.

Work has commenced building our foundation tenant in Workday Financials. With our unique instance of Workday established, in the next few months testing will be planned and started. We’ll be able to work with UVA data and the user scenarios discussed above to assess what changes need to be made, further refine our understanding of which worktags we’ll use, and develop a clearer understanding of how our current-state approaches will effectively evolve in the future state.

Read more about FDM, ask questions, and share ideas in the Online Finance Community!