I am sure you all remember these terms from calculus in high school or early years at College. I love calculus and can go on talking about these terms and how I continue to use them even today. But that is not what I want to talk about…

I think it is natural to want to excel in what we do and this in part requires you to differentiate yourself from your peers. I know, I know, our students don’t come to Wellesley College because we provide a high quality library and technology services. However, this is something our students, faculty and staff expect and failing to provide such services will result in dissatisfaction that will begin to show. Differentiating can come in many different ways. For example, we may be providing support for a particular service just like all of our peers. But exactly how we do things can actually be the differentiator. Are we able to do it with less resources? How creative are we in accomplishing the same relative to the others? I wrote about some of the creative reuses in my previous blog post which are clear differentiators. I would say that our strategy to move to the cloud is another one that differentiates us. I believe we are being strategic and somewhat ahead of many peers.

Obviously, you don’t want to differentiate yourself for the wrong reasons!

Integrations is a whole another story and whereas there are some clear improvements, it continues to be a mess. In most cases, they just don’t work as described during the sales calls. Period. However, some of the most recent integrations that I have been personally involved, are making this much easier than ever before. Granted that these involve much simpler data elements.

I want to specifically mention systems such as Mailchimp, Eventbrite and Handshake for our career services. They all have turned out to be excellent. They publish the Application Programming Interfces (APIs) and these published APIs work. In case of Mailchimp, we had a version 2 integration, which is drastically different than version 3, but they gave us enough time and notice to move to version 3 and frankly, they all just work! And I had a few questions which got answered at speeds that I was surprised.

One of the most common integration we all struggle with is Single Sign On (SSO). This, in general has become close to “Piece of Cake” because of the adoption of SAML 2 protocol.

The next in line where the integration works really well is Workday. I should say that it takes some time to get used to their documentation, but as soon as you get how one of them works, the rest are well documented and as long as you have the appropriate security set up, things just work.

One of the main reasons for better integrations is the adoption of common set of protocols such as Web Services, WSDL (Web Services Description Language), REST (Representational state transfer), SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) etc.

If one were to draw the time and effort needed to implement an integration as a function of time, integral calculus has taught us that the area under that curve is a good estimate of total cost of an integration. In this new world and some of these modern systems, that area is shrinking… But then, there are some that we continue to do, which, in the integral calculus terminology is approaching infinity! I won’t tell you wha those systems are.