Tuesday, July 1, the College of William and Mary launched Workday, an Enterprise Resource Planning platform that will partially replace Banner throughout the fall semester. Workday will become the main resource for student workers and faculty, integrating finance, human resources and payroll into one system. Work compensation, student hiring and other functionalities will all be located in Workday.
For the time being, Banner Student will remain the main resource for students. Banner Student will continue to host tuition payments and billing, class schedules, transcripts and other student information.
The first phase of the Workday rollout was the July 1 launch of Human Resources and Finance core functionalities. The second phase will go live in January 2026 and includes additional components to the website, such as budgeting, employee learning talent and performance tools.
“It is not yet determined whether student resources will be included eventually in the Workday transition,” Chief Information Officer Edward Aractingi explained. “As far as students, we’re exploring our options. We are talking with Workday and evaluating how we fix our environment, how we can modernize the student information system that currently is Banner.”
The main shift in student resources will be for student workers, as payroll systems will transition to Workday.
“Any student employee that is going to have that employee part of their experience or journey at William and Mary will interact with Workday, with sheets, and with payslips,” Aractingi said.
Shifting from Banner, Workday allows student identification numbers and employment information to be visible within the College’s platform to users.
Chief Technology Officer Corinne Picataggi expressed the platform’s dedication to student privacy and the importance of using identification numbers over names and other personal information.
“If you think about our William and Mary ID number, we introduced that at universities because we didn’t want to use social security numbers,” Picataggi said. “We introduce ID numbers because they’re not meant to be private.”
“Using just a name in the Workday platform is tricky,” Picataggi said. “That’s where that ID number becomes an additional identifier to identify you as you, but it’s never used in a way that compromises your privacy or security.”
At a board of visitors meeting in July, College President Katherine A. Rowe expressed her enthusiasm and commitment to the new platform as a part of the College’s broader Vision 2026 strategic plan.
“For an administrator, it’s all in one place,” Rowe said. “Instead of getting a million emails saying to do this over there and sign into that system, it’s one system, one list. It doesn’t matter if it’s a timesheet or if somebody is requesting leave or travel authorization. It’s close to a state-of-the-art business system for the university.”
“It’s the technology equivalent of the Sadler Center or the Wellness Center,” she said. “There’s one stop for all the dimensions you might care about.”
In 2022, the College began to evaluate the possibility of updating the ERP system to a cloud-based system, rather than a server-based system like Banner. After several demonstrations and feedback sessions hosted by Information Technology, the College began transitioning to Workday.
Before the July 1 launch, previous data and work systems had to be converted from Banner to Workday. Aractingi explained the timeline required for the data conversion process at an institution with decades of data.
“That was months and months that the team was doing to prepare,” Aractingi said. “Not just the technical side of extracting and transforming, but there was an incredible amount of time spent on validation.”
Aractingi explained other strengths of the modern interface of Workday.
“The state-of-the-art part comes from the technology but also the experience that it delivers to the users,” Aractingi said. “We have tools, like a mobile app that is very modern and intuitive because it has similar navigation and menu structures as other modern platforms that we use at work but also in our personal lives.”
Similar to many other transitions ongoing at the College as part of the Vision 2026 Strategic Plan, the Workday rollout requires significant investment. Operating costs for Banner have continued while Workday operations have begun with increased labor dedication for data conversion.
“The real cost is really that transition. It’s the work that we did over the last year and a half. During the transition, you’re paying for both because you were building the new system while you were still paying for the old system,” Aractingi said.
Aractingi added that the costs of eventually fully utilizing Workday will remain similar to the current operating costs of Banner.
“We’ll start seeing the savings as we transition off of Banner and cancel the Banner contract,” he said.
