CIOs Talk Reasons for Investing in iPaaS for Data Integration and Automation

As organizations have had to quickly embrace a more digital experience to properly service end-users and customers, CIOs have been looking for new ways to maintain a high level of service with a distributed workforce and limited resources. Many CIOs now have initiatives around modernization and digital transformation – all aimed at better access to data and improved connectivity between people, processes and tech.

Amongst these pressures, CIOs are turning to Integration Platform as a Service – iPaaS. iPaaS allows for the integration of enterprise data and automation of a variety of tasks through an organization. Using iPaaS as the ultimate foundational layer, departments can pull data together from siloed systems (ERP, CRM, SIS, LOB point solutions…) and get a holistic view of the organization; automate time-consuming, manual processes; and securely shore up the growing number of APIs in use through the org.

Recently, a group of TDX iPaaS users sat down to discuss their vision for the platform and how they are each using it to better serve employees and customers. Here’s what they had to say.

iPaaS Drives Efficiencies, Customer Satisfaction

Automatically Approve VPN Access

For David Mitchell, Enterprise Application Administrator at Western University of Health Sciences, one of the big draws for iPaaS is the ability to automate some of the daily or weekly tasks that bog down his team. For example, when everyone moved to remote during the pandemic, there was a lot of faculty and staff that needed VPN access. Mitchell and his team built out a flow within TDX iPaaS to automate the request and approval process for VPN access.

“This isn’t something that’s difficult for a technician to go in and approve, but by automating the process, it’s one less thing for them to have on their plate. It gives them back time that they can use to focus on bigger projects.”

Multi-Channel Communication Made Fast, Easy and Automated

Jason Pelletier, Senior Director of Client Services and Technology at Bowdoin College agrees. Since implementing TDX iPaaS at the college, Pelletier and his team have been focusing on the efficiencies they can gain through the use of the tool, “Overall, we’ve gained efficiencies in a lot of our processes and that, in turn, gives us the opportunity to focus on the client experience.”

Pelletier said many of the flows they’ve built focus on how they are getting the message to customers, making sure communication and transparency are prioritized, “We leverage the full capabilities of the notification process within the TDX iPaaS flows which allows us to manage the client experience so that it doesn’t just feel like a robot sending a message.”

"Our call volume has increased. Being able to take repetitive tasks off our plates gives us more time to focus on helping people.”

iPaaS Reduces Resource Drain

Automate Repetitive Tasks (i.e. ActiveDirectory Updates - Distribution Groups - Name Changes)

“One of the biggest benefits for me, and for our technicians, is that a lot of these mundane tasks we have to do daily are all automated now – we don’t have to think about them ever again,” Mitchell said. “This frees us up to work on higher priority work, work that requires people. And especially right now, with us all working from home, our call volume has increased. So being able to take a lot of these repetitive tasks off our plates gives us time to focus on helping people in need without worrying about everything else.”

No Code Flow Building Accelerates Time to Value

For Kevin Cook, Application System Engineer at BYU-Idaho, the appeal of iPaaS has been its ease of use. Cook said one of the biggest values of the tool is anyone can use it – you don’t need a highly technical resource dedicated to it.

“With TDX iPaaS you aren’t required to have a programmer to work within the tool and make flows, and that’s been huge,” he said. “Highly technical programmers are in high, high demand right now, so it’s great that we can throw this out to non-developers, and they can understand the drag-and-drop functionality and build processes without needing that coding knowledge.”

JP Brannan, ITSM Tools Service Manager at Cornell University, agrees. For Brannan and Cornell, a big driver for implementing iPaaS was the ability to reduce resource drain.

“We wanted to be able to free up resources,” he said. “Out of our Central IT organization, we’ve had about 10 percent of employees retire in the last year, so our staffing is very lean, but the work is still there. We want to be able to automate and promote more self-service so there are fewer individual tickets for our frontline technicians to process. This allows our higher-level technicians to better manage the health of our services without needing to do so many manual, routine processes.”

iPaaS Helps Synchronize Data

Another driver for investing in iPaaS for both Brannan and Pelletier was the ability to manage and transform data in a way that eliminates human error.

Aggregate Data from Multiple Systems

At Bowdoin, Pelletier is using iPaaS to help condense legacy custom attributes and ticket types in an effort to streamline service management and provide a better customer experience.  “Over the years we’ve collected a lot of data because there’s a lot of data we want to report back on, but it can get confusing for someone who hasn’t been working within our systems since the beginning,” Pelletier said. “We were also finding it was becoming complex for our customers who didn’t know what fields to select because of all the options available so we knew we had to fix it.”

Clean Up Data and Synchronize Across Systems

Using TDX iPaaS, Pelletier and his team have been able to clean up the data, for both current and historical reporting, “TDX iPaaS is helping us to get a clear picture of our data so we can see the fields that we truly need.”

At Cornell, Brannan and his team use iPaaS to eliminate the errors that can happen with manual data entry, especially when resources are limited but requests are growing.  “We knew we wanted to use iPaaS to mitigate the risk of human error in data entry so we could improve the quality of the data we were seeing,” Brannan said. “We really have a focus on keeping our data clean, so we know the metrics we report on are correct. We rely heavily on making data-based decisions, so clean, accurate data is essential.”

To learn more about TeamDynamix iPaaS visit www.teamdynamix.com/ipaas.