Integration debt is one of the most common, and most underestimated, challenges in higher education technology. Problems build gradually, through well-intentioned short-term decisions made under the pressure of unreliable systems. 

Our partnership with the Royal College of Art began with a complex integration landscape. But it became something larger: a programme of stabilisation, strategic redesign, and genuine capability building, touching governance, ways of working, and the institution’s readiness for what comes next.

We’ve published the full case study on our website. What follows are the five lessons we think matter most for any HE institution that recognises something of itself in that description.

1. Technical debt and its wider problems

At the RCA, fragmented integrations over time became a wider problem. Collectively, they created what the team described as an “architectural spaghetti map”, with no consistent standards, accountability spread thin, and a support commitment that had outgrown the support that the team could provide.

Integration problems don’t tend to surface until something breaks, or until a new project reveals what’s wrong. By that point, the cost of fixing it is significantly higher.

2. How to make stability and strategy co-exist

One of the biggest pressures in integration is keeping live services running while making improvements. These two things can feel like they’re pulling in opposite directions.

Our approach with the RCA was to do both simultaneously. We stabilised urgent delivery first, which built trust, then used space earned from that trust to design a more sustainable architecture.

3. Technology works when the governance is clear

Choosing the right integration platform matters. But without clear ownership and proper governance, even the best platform won’t deliver consistently.

At the RCA, we helped establish an integration function from the ground up. That meant clarifying ownership, standardising decisions making, and creating internal structures that allow the team to operate with confidence.

4. Building capability beats creating dependency

Upon delivery, we could have delivered the integrations, handed over the documentation, and left. That’s not what we did.

We believe good consultancy spans past delivery. By the end of the engagement, the RCA had a growing integration function with the skills, confidence, and foundations to lead their own change, not just make sense of what we’d built.

5. Pragmatism is a feature, not a compromise

The RCA team used a word to describe us: pragmatic. It would have been easy to over-engineer a solution, to build something that looked impressive but didn’t address the organisation’s reality.

Instead, we worked within the organisation’s constraints, respected the complexity, and made progress without adding unnecessary overhead. In resource-pressured environments, pragmatism makes a difference.

Read the full story

The full case study further explores the details of our approach, the outcomes, and what it meant for the RCA. Find out more.