Banner was never designed to be a hub for a dozen downstream systems, yet at nearly every university that is exactly what it becomes — feeding Power BI dashboards, LMS rosters, access control, and finance exports simultaneously.
The integrations that survive re-orgs and version upgrades share one trait: they treat Banner as a system of record you read from carefully, not a database you poke at directly. Views, documented contracts, and a clear owner for each extract save you when an upgrade silently renames a column.
My rule after two decades: every integration gets a written contract and a monitoring alert before it goes anywhere near production — even the “quick” ones. Especially the quick ones.
