Yale University is planning a migration to a new tool called Workday. Workday is platform to manage enterprise level data and services, including payroll, Human Resources and Talent Management/Recruitment. The first phase of the University’s transition to Workday will focus on the “people” data within Human Resources. As a downstream user of  “people” data, specifically for populating the Voyager patron database, the library has been coordinating with University ITS since early September to ensure all critical operations that depend on this data continue to work seamlessly.

Despite the significant changes that the Workday platform will bring to staff workflow and interfaces in Human Resources, not much will change for the library. This is good news. The data the library extracts from University data sources, including Banner and Datawarehouse, will remain unchanged. From our technical end, the procedure to query and extract data will also remain unchanged. The Workday platform is providing a new data input interface for University staff, however, that same data will continue to be fed to Banner and Datawarehouse sources.

All change is worth examining though, and so the library will be coordinating with Sterling Library Access Services staff to test the patron data extract process during the first three weeks of February 2015. If any issues arise during this window, University ITS staff are available to address them with us. Once this testing period is complete, the next step will be waiting for a cut over to Workday. University ITS is anticipating early April 2015 for this production cut over.