eDiscovery Collection for Workday
Wage & Hour Disputes
Collect, Analyze, and Review payroll registers, time‑tracking, and worker history information.
M&A due diligence
Validate workforce composition, retention metrics, and compensation structures.
Discrimination & Harassment
Analyze employee relations cases, feedback, and talent reviews.
SOX & Financial Audits
Journal entries, approval chains, and Adaptive Planning workbooks.
The Workday Platform
Workday runs on a single‑tenant‑logical / multi‑tenant‑physical architecture where every customer is always on the same code version and data model.
Key attributes relevant to eDiscovery:
- Object‑oriented data model (“Business Objects”) with automatic effective‑dated history (auditability).
- “Report Writer” and Prism Analytics expose every field—including custom objects—without additional ETL.
- Enterprise Interface Builder (EIB) for bulk outbound/inbound data in CSV, XML, or JSON.
- Comprehensive SOAP & REST APIs secured via OAuth 2.0 and WSDL‑based service definitions.
- Attachments & Drive store original files (PDFs, scans) linked to transactions with SHA‑1 content hashing.
Extracting Workday Data for eDiscovery & Investigations
Custom Report-as-a-Service (RaaS)
- Access any reportable field delivered in XML, CSV, or JSON formats through a secure HTTPS endpoint.
- Scales flexibly from low to high volumes.
- Always include the Workday ID (WID) along with Effective Start/End dates to build a defensible timeline of changes.
- Append `?format=csv` to the endpoint for quick CSV exports.
Enterprise Interface Builder (EIB)
- Scheduled exports of full tables or delta files containing only changes, available in CSV or JSON.
- Handles high volumes reliably.
- Enable Change Detection to extract only inserts and updates, minimizing data transfer.
- Sign and hash payloads for integrity verification during transport.
Prism Analytics Data Hub
- Pre-curated datasets enriched by blending with external sources, exportable directly to S3 in Parquet format.
- Variable, depending on the blend complexity.
- Ideal for cross-system investigations requiring unified views. Leverages built-in column-level lineage for audit-ready traceability.
SOAP/REST APIs
- Real-time transactional data pulls returned in JSON or XML.
- Suitable for low to medium volumes.
- Filter requests using `lastModifiedDateTime` to avoid full scans.
- Respect the default throttle of 100 requests per minute to prevent rate limiting.
Attachments API / Workday Drive
- Binary documents tied to specific business objects.
- Low volume, focused on file attachments.
- Use `?location=drive` in requests to retain original folder structure and context from Workday Drive.
Preservation Tip: Workday retains audit snapshots indefinitely but purge rules may delete Change Log entries after 24 months. Issue legal hold or clone tenant for “HOLD_2025Q2” to ensure data immutability.
Related Technologies in the Workday Portfolio
- Adaptive Insights (Workday Adaptive Planning) – Enterprise FP&A & planning
- Scout RFP (Workday Strategic Sourcing) – Procurement & sourcing workflows
- Peakon (Workday Employee Voice) – Employee sentiment & engagement analytics
- VNDLY – Vendor & contractor management
- Zimit – Quote‑to‑cash CPQ for services
Company
Workday, Inc. (NASDAQ: WDAY) delivers cloud‑native human capital management (HCM), finance, and planning applications to more than 10,000 organizations worldwide. In its Q1 FY 2026 earnings release (May 22 2025), Workday reported $2.24 billion in total revenue (subscription revenue $2.06 billion), up ≈ 12.6 % year‑over‑year, with a 24‑month subscription backlog of $18.3 billion.
Origin
Workday was founded in March 2005 by PeopleSoft veterans Dave Duffield and Aneel Bhusri after Oracle’s hostile takeover of PeopleSoft. Over breakfast at a Nevada‑California diner, they sketched the vision for a pure‑cloud ERP suite that would “put people at the center of enterprise software.” The first HCM customers went live in 2006, and Workday completed a landmark IPO in 2012 at a $9.5 billion valuation.