Rio Tinto adds Workday, ServiceNow to HR transformation architecture

Rio Tinto has progressively revealed more details of a HR transformation it has embarked on, with both Workday and ServiceNow to be deployed across the miner’s global operations.

A series of recent - but now expired - recruitment advertisements shed further light on the project, including the company’s technology choices.

A Rio Tinto spokesperson declined to comment when contacted by iTnews.

The advertisements suggest the company wants to deploy a HR system based on Workday and ServiceNow’s HR service delivery (HRSD) module.

This is in addition to standing up a ‘lakehouse’ environment in Databricks to act as a consolidated store of HR data, which can be tapped for reporting or analysis.

The company recently suggested it hoped to “bring [its] global Workday implementation vision to life” over the next 15 months, suggesting a completion date around September 2024.

“Rio Tinto is looking to implement a new tier one human capital management solution that will impact every employee globally,” the company said in one of the advertisements.

The company indicated that it has appointed a system Integrator on the project, and needed dedicated internal resources to run the program on its end.

The exact architecture and integration between the known elements - Workday, ServiceNow HRSD and Databricks - wasn’t immediately clear.

It’s possible that Workday is the central HR management system, ServiceNow HRSD is to enable some HR process automation, and Databricks is a single source of truth for all HR data (past and present), but the company declined to describe the architecture in more detail.