Pima County is using TeamDynamix iPaaS to integrate systems both within IT and outside of IT to automate processes like onboarding and offboarding employees.
“We are starting small, hoping to use automation to take tickets and automatically deploy software to endpoints, to onboard and offboard users with Active Directory and distribution groups,” Hayes said.
When it comes to onboarding new hires, the county’s goal is to have new employees arrive on day one with everything they need to get to work, “You don’t need to waste so much time when it comes to onboarding,” Hayes said. “It really is such a sour experience for a new hire to come in, in this day and age, and sit around for three days waiting on their computer to show up. We need to get out of that mode and iPaaS is going to help us do that.”
In addition, using iPaaS to automate offboarding will save countless hours for a process that is normally very manual and heavily audited as Pima County is a government entity.
“As a government organization we get audited by the state every year and they want to know what these stale accounts are doing sitting here,” Hayes said. “Offboarding is currently a very manual process – having to review the list from HR of people who are no longer employed with us and manually revoking their privileges from all the different systems and software and disabling their accounts. There’s absolutely no reason for that to not be automated. iPaaS is going to help us a lot with this and save us time.”
Western University of Health Sciences has also been using iPaaS to increase efficiencies and save time. David Mitchell, Enterprise Application Administrator, said they started by automating simple tasks, things like automatic VPN access for approved users, keeping assets up to date and reconciling data between Active Directory and Banner.
“A lot of these tasks aren’t tasks that are necessarily hard for anyone to do manually, it’s more that they are repetitive and time-consuming,” Mitchell said.
And that’s been one of the biggest draws for iPaaS. “You know, we don’t have a DeLorean to get time back,” Mitchell said referencing the popular time travel trilogy Back to the Future. “But, we do have iPaaS.”
By automating tasks, especially the repetitive ones, Mitchell said their technicians now have time to focus their attention on bigger issues. “We’ve been working in iPaaS since January (2021) and I feel like we’ve already come a long way and are saving time,” he said. “But there’s so much more we can do.”
On the roadmap for WesternU is creating onboarding and offboarding workflows; automated permissions granting for mailboxes, calendars, etc.; adding and removing people from distribution groups based on form inputs; and automatically generating tickets from phone calls.
For Mitchell, the codeless drag-and-drop functionality of iPaaS has really enabled him and his team to move quickly and creatively when it comes to building new workflows.
“I’m not a programmer at all,” Mitchell said. “I don’t know the programming languages, I’m kind of illiterate when it comes to that, but I like to call iPaaS Lego programming because you just snap everything together and it works.”
And because iPaaS has been so easy to use, it’s pushing Mitchell and his colleagues to come up with more ideas for ways it can be used, “We want to see what else we can do within our department and then branch out to other departments – especially the ones that are already doing heavy automation and transition them to iPaaS eventually.”
Are you interested in learning more about iPaaS? Check out: 6 Tips for Finding the Right Enterprise Integration and Automation Platform.
This post was originally published in May 2021 and has been updated with new information.
