Fix Your Workday Integration Before You Build It

Most problems in Workday integration projects don't appear when the integration runs for the first time. They were set up long before that, in the decisions made and the conversations that never happened at the start of the work. Getting integration right requires a different approach from the beginning, and that approach starts with three things most teams skip.

Who Needs to Be in the Room First

Before anything gets configured or built, the right people need to share a common understanding of what the integration is supposed to accomplish. That means bringing together what might be called a Triad: the functional owners affected by the integration in their day-to-day operations, the people responsible for data governance and reporting, and the technical team doing the actual build. All three matter, and all three tend to hold context the others don't have on their own. For a career services integration like one to Handshake, this means including the Workday records lead and the Handshake administrator from the career center, a representative from institutional research, a report writer, and the integration developer. The first conversation should focus on the desired outcome at a high level rather than jumping straight into how to build it. When teams skip this step and go straight to building, they often discover that functional and technical assumptions were never aligned, and the rework that follows is considerably more expensive than the conversation would have been.

Mapping How Two Systems See the Same Data

Every system has its own data model, and cloud systems are not consistent with each other. A word like "Student" means something specific in Workday, something different in Handshake, and potentially something different again in whatever other system is involved. The same is true for terms like "Enrolled," "Active," or "Inactive." Vendors don't coordinate on language. Each comes up with its own definitions, and those definitions shape how records are structured, how relationships work, and what happens to data as it moves between systems. The integration team and the data team need to understand both models well enough to map where they match and where they don't, even if they rely on functional owners to explain the finer operational details.

Checking Whether the Target System Still Fits

Many cloud systems have configurable fields, and those fields were often set up based on how the legacy system worked rather than how the new one does. Before building an integration, it's worth examining whether the system receiving the data has been updated to reflect how Workday is configured. A Slate for Student Success instance built on legacy system configuration needs to be reconfigured before Workday data can flow in cleanly, and skipping that step just embeds the old structure into the new connection. This is often the last thing teams think about and one of the first things that should be addressed, because the integration is only as good as the environment it's flowing into. Getting this right before the build begins means the integration reflects how the institution operates now, not how it operated when the original system was set up.

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