Launching Workday at UW–Madison involved a lot more than just replacing one system with another. For the transition to work, thousands of interconnected systems—from email and door badges to cloud storage and research databases—needed to work seamlessly with the new platform.
Ensuring those systems didn’t miss a beat when Workday came online was an enormous undertaking that took years of careful planning, communication, problem-solving and collaboration involving hundreds of IT professionals in every school, college and division.
The work focused on “ancillary systems”—digital tools employees use every day. Thousands of ancillary systems needed to be reconfigured to receive employee data from Workday instead of the old Human Resources System (HRS) before July 7. Recognizing that this transition would require extensive preparation and coordination, the Identity & Access Management (IAM) Team in the Division of Information Technology (DoIT) partnered with IT system owners across the university to help them prepare.
Supporting the university’s digital ecosystem
IAM staff collaborated with IT system owners to ensure they understood the upcoming changes and provided tools and support as they worked to update their systems.
Consider what it took to keep just one system running smoothly during the transition:
Box, a cloud storage service used by hundreds of departments, relies on employee data to determine who can access Box. If Workday had launched without any adjustments, many university employees would have logged in on July 7 to find they were unable to access and share essential files.
To prevent those scenarios from happening, the Box Team needed to understand how employee data would change, test their system with the new data format, and make the necessary adjustments to ensure continuous service.
That’s where the IAM Team stepped in. In the months leading up to the Workday launch, they coordinated with and supported the Box Team, providing critical technical details about data changes, implementing testing processes including test cases, and responding to the Box Team’s needs and questions..
Multiply that level of detailed coordination across hundreds of systems and system owners, and you start to grasp the scope of this collaborative effort.
A coordinated university effort
IAM served as facilitator and coordinator, communicating early and often with system owners throughout the university to make sure they understood what they needed to do and providing the resources to do it.
That meant sending thousands of automated and personalized messages, creating self-service testing processes, hosting Q&A sessions and recording overview videos. The team created progress-tracking dashboards, developed comprehensive technical documentation, and built testing processes to ensure systems could handle names in Spanish, Hmong, Tibetan, Chinese and Nepali.
Among the many challenges the team tackled, three focus areas help illustrate the complexity, scope and impact of their work:
Making systems more inclusive: One of Workday’s key benefits is allowing employees to include accented characters in their names (think Beyoncé instead of Beyonce). While this represented a significant step forward for inclusion at the university, it also presented a technical challenge. Ancillary systems had to be ready to receive and process the new character set, called UTF-8, or things would break. IAM collaborated with the teams for more than 250 systems, making it possible for those teams to test their systems, anticipate any issues and make needed changes.
Migrating access groups: Workday replaced the university’s longstanding system for organizing departments, called UDDS, with Workday Organizations. That change had a significant impact on Manifest groups—the university’s tool for managing which systems and services different employee groups can access. To keep that access management system running smoothly, IAM helped owners of nearly 1,500 groups review their groups, understand the changes, and make the transition.
Updating bespoke data views: In the most complex part of the project, IAM helped system owners update their “data views”—bespoke presentations of university identity data used by hundreds of ancillary systems. While DoIT encourages departments to use Person API instead, IAM invested a great deal of time and effort in ensuring these mission-critical data views continued to work. The team reviewed over 2,000 of them, communicated with 564 owners and sent over 5,000 emails during testing. The team manually updated 315 data views individually and connected more than 600 data views to over 140 UW software systems when Workday launched.
A community effort with lasting impact
This project succeeded because of the collaborative efforts of hundreds of people throughout the university. System owners took the time to read documentation, attend information sessions, test their systems and report back on their progress. IT leaders in schools, colleges and divisions helped prioritize the work and ensure completion.
For the IAM Team, this was more than just a technical project—it was about supporting the university IT community through a major transition and ensuring that the systems people rely on every day would continue working smoothly.
The behind-the-scenes coordination and testing by both IAM staff and system owners throughout the university made the Workday launch successful for the thousands of university employees and students who rely on these systems every day.