Blog: Prism, Discovery Boards, and the Workday Tools Most People Walk Past, with Dylan Johnson

     Dylan Johnson got his first professional Workday job at a regional user group event. He was still an intern, walked into the room, met his future manager, and that conversation changed the direction of his career. Seven years later, he’s a senior reporting analyst at a 25,000-person global clinical research company, doing the same thing for others in the Carolinas RUG: showing up, contributing, and building the kind of network that pays off when you least expect it.

     That story is worth pausing on. It isn’t really about luck. It’s about showing up to things that most people decide aren’t worth their time.

     Dylan has seen multiple sides of the Workday world. At his first professional role supporting a 1,000-person automotive group, he touched everything and operated as what he describes as a level five to seven across multiple modules. At his current company, a global clinical research organization spanning 50 countries, he goes deep into reporting and Prism Analytics, working at a nine or ten level. Neither path is better, but knowing which mode you are in matters. The skills are genuinely different. A report that runs cleanly at 1,000 employees may become unusable at 25,000, especially when you layer in country-level data segmentation requirements for a global workforce.

     One tool Dylan talked about at length is Workday Prism Analytics. It gets described as a data warehouse, but Dylan and I both prefer calling it a pseudo data warehouse. Prism lets you bring in external data, transform it, and merge it with live Workday data for reporting. I once used it to load 20 years of job history that could never be stored in a standard Workday tenant and combined it with current Workday data in a single report. Dylan uses it for talent acquisition data at scale. With 25,000 employees and a high volume of job applications, running a report directly in Workday would time out. Instead, he loads the data into Prism, schedules it to pre-render at 5am, and when the TA team pulls it up in the morning, it loads in ten seconds. One important caveat worth repeating: Prism data is not live. It refreshes once every 24 hours. Dylan recommends building that fact directly into the report name so end users never assume they’re looking at today’s numbers when they’re looking at yesterday’s.

     The tool Dylan is most enthusiastic about is Workday Discovery Boards. He spent four to five months migrating his talent acquisition team entirely off Power BI and into Discovery Boards, replicating charts, matrix tables, and filter prompts nearly identically to what they had, but with a key difference: the data is live. No 24-hour delay waiting for SQL to be updated, no downloading sheets and uploading them somewhere else. Discovery Boards now support multi-instance fields, bubble charts, and other chart types not available in traditional matrix reports, and up to 20 or more elements per tab compared to the six you get on a standard dashboard. There is not as much formal Workday training for Discovery Boards, which means the people who go looking and figure them out have a real advantage.

     In that same vein, Dylan is a champion for Workday Worksheets. Think Excel inside Workday: multiple tabs, charts, formulas, and a one-click refresh that pulls live data from several reports simultaneously. At his previous company, Dylan used Worksheets to automate a monthly HR scorecard that had been taking three to four hours to build manually. After the build, it was instant. He estimated a 90 percent reduction in time. If you have a recurring process that still lives in a spreadsheet outside of Workday, it is worth asking whether Worksheets could replace it.

     Dylan’s closing career advice is direct: be active in your community and be patient with LinkedIn. Go to RUG events. Volunteer for the leadership team. Post consistently even when it feels like nobody is watching, because the compounding takes time. He is approaching 1,000 followers now after years of steady effort. A recent post about meeting a Workday friend from Japan for dinner in Tokyo got enough engagement that Workday’s own account commented on it. Authenticity travels. Consistency builds the runway.

     If you want to connect with Dylan, find him on LinkedIn. He has a comic book banner on his profile. You will not miss him. And if you want the full conversation, the latest Workday Gold episode is waiting for you.