N/a
- Will I still be able to use ICIS after the new system launches?
- What is in scope of the Great Service Programme? What systems will be affected?
- Will other systems, which currently take data from ICIS, be automatically connected to the new system?
- When is the new system going live?
- How do I find out more about the Great Service Programme?
- Given our mixed success at implementing change at Imperial, what lessons have we learnt from our own recent change programmes?
- Why is the system going live at the beginning of August 2026 as this is just before the start of the onboarding process for our new intake of students
- Has the Great Service Programme team been looking at the examples of challenging Oracle rollouts at other universities to take forward lessons learnt?
- What approach is the Great Service Programme taking to manage the risks we face- especially our external reporting including the REF return?
- Will the parallel payroll testing be carried out on student payments as well from May 2026 to ensure that system will be fit for purpose?
- It looks like departments will only know about new processes shortly before go live? Will there be enhanced HR support during this period?
- How will you ensure that decisions on the programme are made with Registry's requirements in mind?
No, following the switch over to the new system in August 2026, ICIS will no longer be available. Data currently held in ICIS will be migrated to Oracle Fusion Cloud where relevant or will be made accessible in archive format if not.
Core ICIS systems dealing with Finance, Procurement, Expenses, HR, Payroll and Post Award Research are all within scope. Some additional systems such as recruitment and absence management will also be brought into Oracle Fusion Cloud.
Systems outside of the direct scope of the Great Service Programme include: Banner, i360, and Worktribe. However, detailed design work will be carried out to ensure effective integrations between Oracle Fusion Cloud and these other systems.
The Great Service Programme aims to replace and, where possible, improve integrations with other 3rd party systems replacing numerous outdated and manual integration steps currently in place.
The target is that the new system goes live in August 2026. You can view the stages of the Great Service Programme that lead up to this date on our timeline.
Do come back to our webpages that will be added to as the programme progresses for the latest information. Members of the team will also be presenting at the Professional Service events over the coming year, as well as other more local network and staff events to keep the community informed. A Sharepoint site will be launched in early 2025 to house more detailed content and training for staff to access.
Should you have any queries do contact us or visit our contact pages to find a relevant team member to approach.
We want to build on lessons learnt from work that pre-dates this project and the new expertise brought into the team for this programme. Key lessons learnt that are being built on for this work include:
- Appropriate timescales – The Great Service Programme has already spent multiple years in requirement gathering and process mapping, and now has 18 months to carry out detailed design, user acceptance and system testing, ensuring that design and implementation will not be rushed and will be fit for purpose
- Appropriate resourcing and user representation – The Great Service Programme has a large team including experienced staff from across the university’s academic and support services teams, who are dedicated full time to the project to ensure that user needs are front and centre in system design.
- Appropriate operational readiness criteria for ‘go-live’ decision – Reliable functioning of the processes within scope of the Great Service Programme are absolutely essential to Imperial, its staff, and students. As such, we will move forward with the system's launch only once it has been rigorously validated for full operational readiness.
There is no ‘quiet’ period in Imperial’s operations, but in selecting August 2026 for go-live, we will deliver cutover (moving to the new system) at the start of the new financial year and outside of term time, which will help to minimise overall disruption to university processes.
Yes, we have proactively engaged with other organisations that are at different stages of the Oracle Fusion Cloud implementation, including Edinburgh University, and will continue to do so throughout our implementation. We attended an event at Edinburgh University, where we were able to engage with members of their programme team to understand the specific challenges they faced. We have taken several key learnings from these discussions and associated research that are being used to inform how we now work across the programme and deliver the system at Imperial. We also developed contacts at these organisations so that we can continue to engage with them as required throughout the programme.
We carry out regular risk reviews across the programme to keep abreast of potential risks and make sure that we mitigate for them and use our reporting and governance to escalate any risks early. Part of the challenge is ensuring we know what is going on across the university and we are working hard to raise our profile through engagement so we can pick up on any potential dependencies such as REF return. With regards to REF specifically, the benefit of having a team drawn from departments, Research Office and central teams across Imperial, is that we have been directly approached by the group leading on this work and will continue to maintain a relationship with the REF group as this programme progresses to align and support this important work. We are pleased to have Process Outcome Designers on the programme from across the university who have lived experience of how people currently use our system and what is needed moving forward.
We anticipate migrating student payments such as bursaries from payroll into an Accounts Payable Process, and will ensure appropriate testing for this process. Sam McKenney is our Process Outcome Designer representing Student Lifecycle within the Great Service Programme and is actively engaged with other Student Lifecycle workstreams across the university and relevant stakeholder groups to identify where the new system can deliver further improvements to student experience and student facing services and systems.
Process design has begun in earnest from January 2025. We will be actively engaging with faculties and departments throughout this time via our Departmental Process Outcomes Designers and also our Change team. This will include Faculty Operating Officers and key leadership such as Departmental Operations Managers or Research Managers. Prototypes will start to be available from May 2025 and end users (including HR) will be actively engaged in testing from Jan 2026. This aims to give departments time to work out how best to deploy their existing staff to align with new processes. Bespoke training will be provided to different user groups shortly before go-live to ensure training is fresh for users in August 2026. Additional change managers in our team have been recruited to provide support for this work.
View the timeline or get in touch for more detail.
Sam McKenney is our Process Outcome Designer representing Student Lifecycle within the Great Service Programme and the bridge into the Student Lifecycle programme. As such Sam is already engaged with Registry and other key stakeholders to understand their requirements. We see this as co-design on the end-to-end process for student finance processes, with some aspects being delivered through the new system and some through other product development, such as Banner and i360.
Stakeholder representatives will also be asked to continue contributing as Subject Matter Experts in the Discovery Phase of the project, where they offer expertise beyond that already held within the Great Service team.