Integrations at LSE are the foundation of our business processes. They are the mechanism by which we move data between business systems, to enable those processes and deliver efficient and effective services to our school community.
By 2022 our integration landscape had been growing organically for over two decades and contained nearly 500 integrations across over 100 business applications, without an overarching architectural design or consistency in technology or approach. This led to multiple layers of unnecessary complexity, technical debt, and business users experiencing frequent issues that were difficult and manually intensive to identify and resolve. Integrations were often unreliable, resource intensive, hard to manage, and made business applications difficult to replace.
Recognising this as a key barrier to the Strong Operational Core set out in the LSE Technology Strategy, and to the delivery of our major strategic change programmes, in 2023 DTS started the implementation of a Strategic Integration Service built around MuleSoft, a modern cloud-hosted API-led integration platform.
The Strategic Integration Service will improve on the existing automated data sharing between business systems and provide a foundation for future digital transformation. Data will be available when and where it’s needed, in a secure and more modern way. The ability to deliver integrations at pace, in a standardised way, will reduce the burden on staff having to manually reconcile data and manage errors. We will have improved visibility of data moving between business systems, be more responsive to changing requirements and efficient at resolving issues.
Click here to find out more on what it is and what we do.