Metropolitan State University is one of seven universities within Minnesota state and one of 37 institutions (state colleges and universities) as a whole. As you can imagine, there is an abundance of data being collected and shared among these different groups, whether it be across different campuses or on the same campus. This structure caused a great need for a common integration platform and workflow engine.
Ben Deneen, Director of Enterprise Information and Application Services at the university, explains, “Every time something runs, I want all that information, I want the error logs, I want that all documented so that we can run as efficiently and effectively.”
The University chose TeamDynamix iPaaS to do just that.
For example, Deneen is using iPaaS to link up systems and manage security access to buildings and classrooms.
Using the information collected through the use of iPaaS, the security team can verify information and requests when it comes to opening buildings and classrooms using RFID technology for door access. When someone swipes their ID at a door, a workflow will bounce back to the security system to validate credentials. If the person is cleared, the door opens, and the security camera is prompted to record activity at the site so there is a record of who is going in and out.
And that’s just one example of how Metropolitan State is using TeamDynamix iPaaS.
“We were using a different iPaaS tool before and it took a lot of time to spin up and it became really expensive for what we were hoping to do with it,” Deneen said. “It was fine for connecting macro systems, but we couldn’t scale it the way we wanted.”
With TeamDynamix iPaaS, Deneen is not having the same issues. In fact, they’ve been able to move quickly with the new iPaaS tool and use it to integrate all their systems from their old ERP to Workday, Active Directory and more.
“We’re able to easily spin up these connections and make it turnkey so anyone can use it,” Deneen said.
And with so many campuses across the state of Minnesota, it’s been invaluable to be able to have a common integration platform and workflow engine with governance and tracking.
At Pima County, one of the goals of bringing on TeamDynamix for ITSM and iPaaS (integration platform as a service) was to reduce toil.
“People feel so much more empowered and have so much more worth when they are doing things that are intellectually rigorous and challenging versus when they are just repeating the same mechanical actions over and over and over with very little thought,” Mark Hayes, information technology leader at Pima County, said.
“Our ITSM is our entry point to our entire IT organization, and we want our employees to graduate out of this area into other roles within our organization – network technicians, client services, desktop technicians, developers and project managers,” he continued. “If all they’re doing is handling tickets and doing the same mundane, manual tasks over and over that’s not particularly great training. So investing in tools that allow our employees to engage in meaningful work is something that’s important to us as an overall IT organization.”
With TeamDynamix now in place, Pima County is looking to automate and integrate as much of the manual ITSM processes into workflows as they can.
“The drudgery of working through mundane, repetitive tasks doesn’t exist just in IT,” Hayes said. “I think the more we can reduce toil within the departments that we support, the more people are going to buy in and understand the value of what we’re trying to achieve. There’s nothing like success to breed more success, and once other departments see the benefits they’re going to want these tools too.”
To learn more about iPaaS from TeamDynamix visit www.teamdynamix.com/ipaas or read the latest market study from InformationWeek: InformationWeek: State of IT – Resource Drain.
This post was originally posted in March 2021 and has been updated with new information.
