We’re thrilled to announce that the Integration Hub won a 2025 Administrative Improvement Award. This awards recognizes excellence in designing and implementing our collection of enterprise APIs and integration platform (IICS).
This collection of enterprise APIs and our low/no-code integration platform have already helped to improve how applications and systems across Universities of Wisconsin interact with each other and integrate data. This set of products has improved interoperability and integration across UW’s data ecosystem, enabling new use cases and improving the integrator experience. For example, as we transition to Workday, all UW Student Information Systems will use the Person API for provisioning, credentialing, and identity matching across the Universities of Wisconsin.
This post summarizes what the Integration Hub is, why and how it came to be, and the impact that it has had across UW-Madison.
Objective
At any given time, hundreds of applications and systems across the UW–Madison campus need to interact with each other, providing access to the data and information everyone across the university needs to work, study and conduct research.
And with new institutional needs continuously emerging and evolving at a rapid clip, we need to ensure effective information sharing between people, systems and technologies to optimize outcomes, accuracy and quality of experience.
But for many years, a long-running lack of an institutional integration strategy for applications and data has led over time to a patchwork of system integrations, solving specific problems for specific applications. This approach created a tangled mesh of dependencies between applications that’s fragile and difficult to maintain over time.
When one system makes a change or gets an upgrade, the change ripples across other systems downstream that are sometimes far removed from the source of the change. This means that changes require exhaustive testing.
One example: When the Student Information System (SIS) gets upgraded, more than 100 different integrations might need to be reviewed—many requiring manual testing and verification.
As a result of this fragility and risk, change can be difficult and slow. System owners often cannot move as quickly as they would like to implement new functionality or pursue new opportunities. Successes that we see at peer institutions may be difficult to replicate, due to inflexibilities in our infrastructure.
So when the Universities of Wisconsin moved toward implementing the cloud-based Workday enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to standardize and streamline finance, human resources and other processes, DoIT leadership saw a new, related opportunity.
To lay the groundwork for a successful Workday implementation, we needed to improve the data integration methods that affect more than 1,000 “ancillary systems” at UW-Madison.
And that was much easier said than done. Over the years, data integration complexity grew as UW relied on numerous point-to-point integrations, making data access and management cumbersome. Different data warehouses for three key domains–Person, HR and Finance data–led to confusion and inefficiency. Shadow copies of data created from these warehouses led to unclear data usage.
In addition to the myriad technology challenges we historically faced without a comprehensive data integration strategy, a number of campus culture factors also contributed to complexity. For many years, if you needed to do some data integration work to support your local school/college/division’s needs, it often depended on who you know. We refer to this phenomenon as “integration by folklore”—maybe you knew someone in DoIT, or perhaps you did a project with someone years ago and approached them again with your new need. Disparate data sources and data access procedures often led to confusion about how to source data to support UW business operations, so people often relied on their personal connections.
In short, we lacked a solid state of data integration in which a developer could answer the question: “I need these particular data elements. What’s the authoritative place to go for them?”
As the precursor Interoperability Initiative sought to map out a more thoughtful approach to how we “plug things in” to the UW data ecosystem, DoIT teams created a new “Integration Hub.” Providing the right tools and support to allow university systems to exchange data, this new hub facilitates improved data integration—replacing the often custom, disjointed capabilities of legacy systems.
Improvements
Throughout the process of planning and creating the Integration Hub, biweekly sprint reviews were open to the campus and Universities of Wisconsin communities. The purpose of the sprints included highlighting new data elements coming into the hub, demos, and feedback, discussion and collaboration among participants representing differing needs across UW and the system. Typical attendance at these ongoing sprint meetings averages about 60 to 80 participants.
Since its inception, the team focused on doing things “the right way,” to address the many challenges inherent in vastly improving data sharing and application integrations across the university. Essentially, the team’s driving ethos was to make the right thing the easy thing for people to do when it comes to their data integration needs (e.g., no more “integration by folklore”).
From initial stakeholder discovery sessions to rigorous procurement evaluations and vendor product assessments, the team remained committed to its mission statement: To develop and maintain high-quality, modern interfaces to enterprise data through Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and products that enable the teaching, learning, research, and administrative goals of the Universities of Wisconsin community.
At the same time, improving data integration methods for ancillary systems was a key goal to lay the groundwork for the successful implementation of Workday.
But before we dive into the improvements made possible by the Integration Hub, it’s perhaps first helpful to describe what we mean by an “ancillary system.” An ancillary system consists of any system or application that consumes or outputs HR or financial data, or otherwise uses data about people. An example ancillary system might be as simple as a spreadsheet that pulls in financial data. Other examples include systems with connections to UW-Madison’s Identity & Access Management infrastructure (e.g., NetID, parking, dining hall payments, Tandem Press, Veterinary Medicine patient management, library systems, etc.).
There are more than 1,000 such ancillary systems across campus. Some of these systems will be replaced with the Workday launch, but many will remain. The new Integration Hub is meant for developers and others who need to integrate with data and other applications to support and streamline business processes.
To support this work, the Integration Hub includes tools to help developers across the university integrate their applications efficiently with other applications and university data sources. These tools also simplify the process of integrating off-the-shelf and cloud applications into the UW environment.
To achieve these ends, the Integration Hub includes:
- Enterprise APIs and an API Gateway
- A Developer Portal
- A new low code/no code integration platform: Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services (IICS)
What’s an API, and how is it helpful in data integration? API stands for Application Programming Interface. Similar to how a web user interface allows a human to interact with an application, an API allows an application to interact with other applications. In essence, an API serves as a technical contract–defining all the aspects and expectations of its usage so people who create applications know how to interact with it. APIs are a common mechanism for interacting with data. For example, Uber uses the Google Maps API to help show where a driver is, and Google uses APIs from airline companies to search for flights.
The APIs included in the new Integration Hub were built using similar technologies, they’re presented in the developer portal in the same way, and they were built with the same iterative, customer-driven process—all to ensure we’re providing products that meet the needs of our users and solve real-world problems.
APIs in the new Integration Hub include:
- Person API: For interacting with “person data” such as home addresses, phone numbers, job information, etc.
- Finance API: For data related to funding and validation
- HR API: For data such as Supervisory Organization structure
The Integration Hub also includes a new platform called Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services (IICS). Selected after an exhaustive RFP process, IICS offers UW’s IT community a valuable tool to integrate applications and services of all kinds—from small departmental apps to large cloud-based ERPs.
Integration platforms and the capabilities they offer are becoming increasingly important as cloud adoption increases. Out-of-the-box connectors like those in Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services enable integrations to be done by a wider range of people, not just developers with advanced integration skills.
To help users understand and get started with IICS, the Integration Platform team compiled a robust set of documentation describing processes, patterns, tutorials and examples. The team also defined best practices, created business processes, piloted use cases, and onboarded key early-adopters across the university community.
While the Integration Hub launched prior to 2024, the period from January to November 2024 was a time of heavy continuous improvement. During this time period, more than 40 new data elements were added, tested and released to the Person API for SIS feature development.
Results
Just from between January and February 2025, there were 64.3 million “calls” for data from the Person API in the hub. This already high-volume number will skyrocket after Workday goes live and the new finance and HR data structures go into production.
The products and services in the Integration Hub support have improved interoperability and integration across UW’s data ecosystem, enabling new use cases and improving the integrator experience.
By gathering all our APIs in one place, we met our goal to eliminate much of the “integration by folklore” complexity, creating the authoritative place for technologists across campus to go for what they need. Benefits include:
- Reusability: A single API can be reused many times to fit different use cases.
- Simplicity: APIs abstract a lot of the underlying details of an application. So you don’t need to be an expert in a particular application to be able to understand its API.
- Robustness: Because APIs abstract a lot of underlying detail, they are able to remain more stable while the underlying application can change behind the scenes. A good API allows applications to be able to change and adapt without needing to coordinate with one another.
As one early adopter in the College of Engineering who leverages the Person API for provisioning and credentialing put it: “It speeds up our onboarding process, that’s for sure.”
Impact
The positive impacts and gains we’ve realized from the Integration Hub are numerous and wide-ranging.
- We’ve increased our ability to integrate applications across business systems—enabling faculty, staff and students to perform their work in a more efficient and timely manner.
- We’ve offered a suite of APIs designed to support many use cases—providing data as needed without the need to create “shadow systems” or disrupt times of heavy data traffic typical of annual academic and hiring cycles.
- We’ve implemented a low/no-code integration platform that simplifies data integration, allowing users to build and manage integrations easily in a self-service capacity.
- Users can now leverage authoritative APIs to source, transform and deliver data to meet any range of business needs, including real-time integrations.
- Through our Integrator Training Program, deployed in Canvas, users can learn about data integration, governance, security and the tools available in the Integration Hub—complete with hands-on tutorials.
- Our full-service Integration Team provides end-to-end integration services for customers unable to manage integrations themselves, from business analysis through implementation and operations.
Demonstrating the broad impact of the new Integration Hub, adoption has been widespread:
- The Student Information Systems team uses the Person API for provisioning, credentialing and identity matching across Universities of Wisconsin.
- The Division of Continuing Studies built self-service integrations in IICS to support myriad systems without needing to rely on DoIT for integration work.
- The School of Medicine and Public Health uses IICS for data warehouse and web application data integrations to support the intersection of UW-Madison and UW Health data.
- The Office of Academic and Career Success uses real-time capabilities for incremental student, faculty and staff data integrations to support timely user data and access to key systems.
Next Steps
Our customer-centric approach to the Integration Hub frames the hub as a product that we’ll continuously develop, improve and invest in—not a project with an end date. As such, we continue our biweekly public sprint meetings—as we’ve done for the last three years to ensure that customer needs and voices are being heard.
New data elements in the APIs are continuously being added based on customer needs. In the Person API, for example, several data elements have already been released in 2025, with more in progress.
New business needs for data integration emerge every day. And we are proud to continue to serve as the leading provider of integration solutions and products that empower UW–Madison and the Universities of Wisconsin to achieve our missions.