ERP update: John Wong, technical workstream
In addition to our status updates on the ERP Project, we’ll also be sharing viewpoints from different individuals from our community who have roles within the project. Here, John Wong, Associate Director, Development and our Technical Lead shares his thoughts.
Having been involved in the ERP Project in its early stages, from developing our technical requirements to attending the demo sessions, it’s been exciting to see the project take shape over the past two months since we officially selected Workday.
While our Discovery workshops for the technical stream started just last week, we’ve already been thinking about how we’ll make this transition. We’ve been working through a list of questions from our implementation partner Deloitte on our current systems and started to consider how we will approach data-cleansing, conversions and integrations. My colleague Rosi Woodley has been attending many of the student, finance and human resources workshops as required to bring in an IT perspective.
What impressed me about Workday during the evaluation process was its modern design and how it was developed – built specifically for the cloud. Workday is a cloud-based platform, which means the system is accessible from anywhere using a browser.
Langara has been transitioning to cloud-based systems already, such as our move to Microsoft Office 365, Brightspace by D2L and Raiser’s Edge NXT. The ERP Project represents a continuation of this strategy towards moving away from maintaining applications on our own servers and the considerable investments and resources that entails.
Banner was implemented in 1996, when it was standard practice to customize programs, but there has been a shift away from that idea in the past 20 years as technology has evolved. With Workday, we’ll be looking at how we will configure it to meet our needs as well as looking at how to best migrate data into the system and how it can work best alongside other existing systems at Langara.
Our department will be working closely with the ERP Project team to ensure that we successfully navigate the road ahead. I believe in the long-term, changing to Workday will make everyone’s lives simpler and offer a better user experience to everyone.
John Wong
Associate Director, Development, IT
Learn more.
Want to find out what’s happening to Banner? Visit www.langara.ca/erp for FAQs, project information and more.
