Congratulations to the project team for the official retirement of the university’s legacy Student Information System (SIS) on June 26, marking the conclusion of an era for a platform that served the institution for 30 years.
The enterprise system, which included widely used legacy portals such as WebSTAC, WebFAC, Course Listings, and SISAdmin, has been fully replaced by Workday Student.
The legacy SIS Retirement Team spent more than a year, in partnership with the Office of the University Registrar, planning and executing the decommissioning process. Decommissioning a system with three decades of embedded infrastructure presented unique technical and operational challenges.
“Success was a team effort,” said Jill Fechtman, Assistant Director of Applications and the retirement team lead. “The expertise and hard work of the team was instrumental in retiring a complex and deeply rooted system.”
In addition to Fechtman, the core SIS Retirement Team included Katie O’Donnell, IT Project Managers II, Ted Hindes and Kristina Karrenbrock, both Application Developer Leads, and Samantha Nagel and Mae Soule, both Business Analyst IIIs.
“I am incredibly proud of what our teams, project sponsors and campus partners accomplished,” said Omar AlRefae, Senior Director of Enterprise Systems and Solutions. “Their dedication and commitment have positioned us to better serve the university community with modern, sustainable, and innovative student systems for years to come. Retiring a core university system that has supported our institution for decades requires a tremendous amount of planning, technical expertise and collaboration. Our teams successfully navigated the complexity of a highly interconnected environment, while ensuring that critical legacy data remains available to those who depend on it.”
This achievement follows the successful implementation of Workday Student and the development of more than 100 supporting integrations. Together, these efforts represent a significant step forward in modernizing the student technology experience at Washington University.
The transition required running the legacy SIS and Workday Student in parallel for a period, which involved continuous, bi-directional data transfers while keeping the offline-bound system fully operational. Due to the age of the platform, the team occasionally uncovered unexpected configurations.
“Occasionally we had some surprises,” Fechtman said. “We ran into things we weren’t anticipating. But every time we had one of those, we figured it out.”
The project’s success relied heavily on extensive communication from the Office of the University Registrar and the Workday Student team, which established a firm, unyielding retirement date. Project leaders emphasized that the milestone could not have been reached without the collaboration of distributed IT and campus partners across Washington University in St. Louis.