Most of you know that I continue to be an avid developer. I have also expressed our organizational plan moving forward – low or no code. We are a small institution and have limited staff resources. However, we have realigned our resources in ways that we are still getting a lot done. How? We have shed a lot of the old ways of doing business in ll areas of LTS and in the area of code development, we are coding far less than before. We have an opportunity to do even less with advances in technologies.

I always say that our academic computing colleagues are great examples of those who find strategic uses of technologies to support teaching, learning and research and in predominent number of cases they do not code! They are experts at researching various existing or emerging technologies to see how they fit our institutional culture and practices to help adopt them and support them. The corresponding model in administrative system is business analysts. They are experts who understand the “business” (such as HR, Finance, Registrar, Student Financial Services etc) and try to research how major administrative systems we already have can be used to improve the various business processes and work with the offices to implement them.

This is where tools such as Extend can assist.

There have been tremendous advances in technologies that vastly simplify the development of web applications. There are so many different frameworks that allow you to construct a web application by assembling a set of delivered components, without having to write a lot of repeated code. The user interfaces are controlled by institution specific CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and if you structure your underlying data properly, it is a matter of calling various components to assemble the page, fetch the data from a databasse or save the entered data on a page. However, there is a lot more to this generally, for example, controlling security and access, and transformation of underlying data etc. that still requires considerable amount of coding.

I am proud of the “framework” that we use at Wellesley which has served the community well. It is a set of php based applications that deliver various functionality that our administrative systems could not deliver. But, we have been using this for 10 years and time to look elsewhere. Why? We have a much smaller group of programmers and despite the fact that we all try to code in ways that the app can be supported by each other (proviiding redundancy), it is proving hard. It is impossible to avoid individuality, which, on the one hand we want to encourage, but it also creates a burden when developers leave. This is why the future needs to be low or no code.

Workday Extend is a powerful system and given that our administrative system is Workday, I believe it provides a path for us to transition apps to it. It is a fairly easy system to learn with a formal training program, great documentation and vidoes, examples, and a developer community. It uses IntelliJ (an open source platform, Yay!) as its IDE (Integrated Development Environment).

In very simple terms, Extend offers the possibility for you to develop an application by simply describing the layout of set of web pages, one or more inbound endpoints that fetch relevant data from Workday or elsewhere that is needed for the individual pages, whether it is a viewable page or editable page and if it is the latter, a set of outbound endpoints to receive and save the data and through a predefined set of flow, land you on a confirmation page or next step in the flow.

Pretty much everything about Workday Extend is JSON (JavaScript Object Notation). All web programmers would know what a JSON construct is. Whether the description of a text area on a page (and its properties and attributes)  or data exchanges with end points, all things are JSON. This creates a level of commonality that in my opinion is easily supportable by a group of web developers. In other words there is very little in the way of individual touches one can impose on the description of a page and how it is rendered etc, because they all are well prescribed.

However, data exchange and security is something that requires a different level of understanding. If you are fetching data right from Workday, then a web developer needs to partner with a Workday expert to create reports to access data or use a Webservice to either fetch the data or write data back to Workday. This again is pretty standards based and there is no customization by an individual that would be hard for another to understand! But, like we, at Wellesley are doing initially, sometimes data handling may have to be done somewhere else. In such cases, you do have the problem I described above, individual customizations, but it can be much less.

One of the greatest advantages is the uniformity of user interface. Currently our web applications don’t look anything like Workday interface. As our community is beginning to use Workday more and more, they are getting used to and becoming familiar with that interface. Workday Extend helps us develop apps that can be accessed directly from Workday and look and behave like all other Workday apps. With a pretty small snippet of JSON, we can create reports that can be sorted and searched on just the same way other reports can be. There are so many other frameworks that provide such sorting and searching capabilities with ease, but they are just different in the way they look and feel. And every time Workday upgrades to new features, you get them without a whole lot of changes and they will be fully supported!

When we transition to the next step to accessing and saving the data from/to Workday directly from an Extend App, it removes yet anothe huge hurdle – reliance on shadow systems that live outside Workday. By transitioning to this, we will have a uniform security model for accessing the data. Currently no matter how hard we try to replicate the Workday security access in our external systems, it is a losing battle!

Workday Extend has advanced features that allow you to create your own business objects that can be used to extend existing business objects. For example, the delivered Student object clearly lacks some attributes that we would love to have. We are using other workarounds for some of them now. In addition, it has what are referred to as orchestrations which can be used for a whole bunch of things including creating your own custom business processes and initiating them etc. It will be a while for us to take advantage of all of this and we may decide not to, because, again, for a small group like what we have, simplicity is the key.

So, where do we go from here? We will not necessarily replicte what we did for the last 10 years at the College. When a request for a new app comes to us, we will examine what are the ways we can make it work within Workday. If so, this will be the direction we will go. It is ONLY when we determine that the request is worthy of consideration for further development and that it cannot be done in Workday itself with whats available, we will consider an Extend app. And, when Workday delivers the functionality in the future, we will retire our Extend App. One who is used to Extend App will liely transition to a native Workday app easily.

Based on this criteria, we decided to develop an Extend App for Major/Minor declaration and Academic Plan. Why? Because the Wellesley way of students declaring Majors and Minors and choosing advisors is pretty unique and I am not sure that we are likely to get the same fuunctionality in Workday. And this is so integral to us that we do not want to change the process, so it is a great candidate for Workday Extend. This process is integrally tied to  academic plans that students submit and their advisors approve. Workday has an excellent Academic Planning tool, but we have some specific needs that it is unable to provide at this stage, especially when it comes to double majors or students with a major and a minor. So, we built this in Extend and brought over already developed plans. We are confident that Workday will have an academic plan infrastructure that will work for us in the near future, so we will gracefully transition over and deactivate our planning tool, which has some deficiencies. It took us approximately a month to develop and test it thoroughly and it has been live for just over a month and has been going remarkably well given how complex a transition this was.

So, as you can tell, I am pretty excited about this playing a mjor role in our ability to support our community. A simpler, more sustainable low code approach thats fit for a small development group!