Late last year, we went live with a feed of HR data from our central systems to a local system in the University’s School of Informatics.  This is now being duplicated for the School of Biological Sciences, and feeds to other schools are planned.

These data feeds are needed because the old source of this information was removed when our HR systems were replaced last year.  This was an opportunity to replace the outdated mechanism for extracting this data with a new API-based system.  We were able to copy the data feeds that were implemented by the HR replacement project, which connect the new system to services such as Pure (for research publications), Estates, and the University’s Identity Management System.

In fact, this project was able to improve on the existing feeds by learning from the experience of running with those feeds.  The new project has improved error handling, which more or less eliminates the effort required to support the feed.  We now intend to upgrade the existing feeds to this improved approach, to reduce the support effort for those feeds.

I’m a little late blogging about this because we gave a seminar about it at the end of January, but it’s worth mentioning here as well because it’s an important step in providing administrative data to local systems.  Our aim is that ISG will eventually provide a range of data feeds, via APIs, with appropriate service support.

You can watch the seminar or read the slides for this and our other seminars at the page below.  By the way, the slide that is rather confusingly titled “Failures” is showing a zero failure rate for the new system, compared to the feeds that don’t yet have the improved error handling.

Applications Directorate Lunchtime Seminars

HR Data Feed to University Departments / Enterprise Architecture by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0