Introducing ‘Project WakeDay’ – new Student Information System coming in 2024

October 4, 2022

A message from Provost Michele Gillespie and Executive Vice President Hof Milam.

Dear faculty and staff,

We have important news to share. Wake Forest has undergone a thorough, multi-year evaluation of our administrative systems to better ensure our students’ academic success and evolve with changing needs and expectations in higher education. As a result of this evaluation, our community shared its desire for modern, mobile-friendly platforms that have intuitive user interfaces, expand access to reliable data, and leverage secure and scalable technology to help us deliver the best learning outcomes possible for all our students. 

To meet the dynamic and evolving needs of the Wake Forest community, we identified the replacement of our current Student Information System (SIS) – Banner – to transform our student, faculty and staff experience. To that end, we are excited to announce the launch of Project WakeDay to support our implementation of Workday Student.

Workday Student was selected through an extensive and inclusive evaluation that engaged students, faculty and staff beginning in 2017. Designed and built in partnership with higher education institutions, Workday Student is already in use or being implemented at several peer institutions. This integrated system will bring together disparate processes and will enable: 

• students to update their personal information, register for classes, and view/manage their account statements, 
• faculty to advise their students, view their course rosters, and submit grades, and 
• staff who support academic units and processes to access academic and student information. 

What has happened so far? Over the summer, nearly 100 team members participated in discovery conversations with our implementation partner, Huron, to outline current processes and begin to map potential changes and their impacts. Planning conversations have recently concluded, and we are in the process of developing a comprehensive timeline to be shared with our community later this month. The project is expected to span 30 months, featuring several launches of functionality that follow the regular semester lifecycle, with the majority of users expected to transition to the new system in the spring of 2024.

Where can I learn more? A project website, wakeday.wfu.edu, has been created to keep you up to date on progress and publicize opportunities to get involved in the design of the new SIS experience. A comprehensive process to capture your requirements and feedback throughout the project is forthcoming, but for now, you can share your thoughts and ask questions through this form, monitored by key project team members. You are welcome to provide feedback anonymously, if preferred, but keep in mind this limits our ability to follow up with you.

We know change is disruptive, but with your partnership and our joint engagement, we will have the opportunity to expand what we think is possible and transform our ability to connect, advise and support the academic experience. 

We offer our enormous thanks to the faculty and staff across campus who have continued working together to prepare us for this undertaking. We are excited to begin this journey and are committed to making sure you have the tools, time and resources required to understand and adapt to changes for a successful implementation.