Digital transformation is crucial for businesses of all sizes in today’s digital age. However, undertaking a successful digital transformation initiative can be tricky. One important aspect of a successful digital transformation is making sure your IT infrastructure is able to keep up with the increased demand and new requirements. That’s where iPaaS comes in.
Using an integration and automation tool like iPaaS can help you migrate to the cloud, manage APIs and develop integrations quickly and easily. So if you’re looking to take your business to the next level, iPaaS should be part of your digital transformation strategy.
Let’s look at some of the ways that iPaaS positively affects digital transformation.
iPaaS Enables Digital Transformation
At one point in time, using Software as a Service (SaaS) was a resource that would give an organization an advantage over others. Now, the use of SaaS is common and iPaaS is the new way to be one step ahead. iPaaS provides businesses with a quicker, simpler way to complete tasks and run processes through integration and automation. This is significant for organizations that use a lot of disparate tech stacks throughout different departments, and for organizations that want to level up their IT service management (ITSM) processes.
The ability to rapidly build integrations is one of the features of iPaaS that directly correlates to digital transformation. iPaaS reduces integration building time by up to 90%, allowing for an abundance of time and resources- that are typically used to work on integrations- to be allocated elsewhere.
TeamDynamix’s codeless iPaaS integration and workflow platform helps companies to keep up with digital transformation by cutting down on integration backlogs. This improves day-to-day operations, allowing your company to outperform the competition.
The purpose of digital transformation is to create a better experience for both the customer and the employee and to improve specific processes and productivity. iPaaS was specifically built to save time, as its rapid integration building can prevent team members from going into a multitude of different systems to change the same piece of data repeatedly. It increases productivity because the automation it provides allows time to be allocated to more important parts of an organization. This means that customers can experience better service, getting their questions answered in a more efficient manner since employees have more time to focus on them.
Digital transformation and iPaaS go hand in hand.
iPaaS Helps to Modernize Legacy Systems
Companies often latch onto their legacy systems because it’s what everyone is comfortable with, even though a new option might be a smarter choice to move the company forward. When choosing iPaaS, these companies can have the best of both worlds, as iPaaS allows organizations to easily integrate with legacy systems. There are a handful of benefits to this, including:
- Secure integration of systems and data.
- An easy-to-use interface.
- Access to better tools without compromising legacy systems.
The hybrid cloud environment, which includes data located on the cloud as well as on-premise, is what allows for such a secure integration process. As for ease of use, this comes from the fact that in most cases, organizations don’t need to rely on specialists to get started. IPaaS’s codeless nature means anyone can build an integration or workflow.
Additionally, modernizing these legacy systems gives employees access to better tools that help facilitate collaboration, communication, and transparency. With these tools, departments can interact in a much easier way, improving cross-functionality.
Maureen Fleming, Program VP of Intelligent Process Automation Research at IDC, explains that enterprises will extend and re-platform their legacy integration software (with something like iPaaS) to “gain greater flexibility to pursue innovation, avoid unnecessary lock-in, and standardize their software choices, which will be disruptive over the next five years.”
Other iPaaS Benefits
Because iPaaS helps seamlessly connect software applications and synchronize data, it can have long-lasting benefits to an organization’s operations:
- Cost-effective integration. By implementing iPaaS, organizations can supercharge their teams with a library of pre-built connectors to systems that are used every day. All of this connectivity provides the backbone for digital transformation.
- Improved security and compliance. Extensive use of APIs has opened organizations to security risks, while bespoke scripts are often uncontrolled and undocumented. With a centralized integration platform, access points and workflows are controlled.
- Creation of the golden record. When data resides in disparate systems, organizations have a hard time achieving a single source of truth. With iPaaS, organizations can harmonize and transform data so that they are able to point to a true record.
- Improved accuracy. Because iPaaS leverages a centralized connector library, creating workflows is easier and more straightforward. CIOs can be more secure in the workflows and connectivity built across their 100+ systems.
- Greater employee efficiency. Process automation is a key outcome of true digital transformation. The ability to quickly and easily build workflows using a visual flow builder helps employees do more, in less time.
Pairing ITSM/ESM Platforms with iPaaS
IT Service Management (ITSM) and Enterprise Service Management (ESM) platforms all have some level of workflow and automation but this is mostly only within the actual system itself. You can automatically route a ticket or automatically close something and so on, but that is not really enterprise automation.
To achieve true automation, organizations need a platform that can quickly integrate with hundreds of applications – and iPaaS is the answer. Instead of having a bespoke automation tool inside every single application – of which there are likely to be 100-300 – why not have everything housed in ONE codeless platform that’s easy to use and requires no developers.
By using iPaaS, your technical resources can learn and leverage a single hub – versus acquiring deep system expertise in all 300 applications you need to integrate. With a single system to learn, you can eliminate manual processing and the long wait times for developer resources to free up.
A Complete Integration and Automation Solution
High-performing enterprise IT teams need a single place where they can manage the full range of integrations and workflow deployments. The TeamDynamix iPaaS platform is built with ease of use in mind and with a full range of features including modern API management; state of the art security and governance; out-of-the-box connectors; best-in-class quality and troubleshooting features; and more that can position your team for the high growth and challenges of the next decade.
Since purchasing iPaaS from TeamDynamix, the main focus for Ken Libutti, CIO, and his team at Palm Beach State University has been data integration and transparency, “We’ve made sure that we can populate the data warehouse using iPaaS to get the data out of our different applications and systems, and use all of that data to populate the dashboards we’ve created for our administrative and executive staff,” he said.
But there’s also been a focus on what the user interface looks like for students and faculty as well.
“We want to present a single pane of glass to the students so they can really see what their education plan is, what their progress looks like, who their advisor is and what events are relevant to them if they’re in clubs or things like that,” Libutti said. “So we have several interfaces that we’re working on and trying to understand how we can pull those all together using iPaaS and our data warehouse.”
For Libutti and his team, they’re just scratching the surface of what they feel they can do with iPaaS.
“We want all the data to come into the data warehouse because we know TeamDynamix iPaaS can keep all those APIs in sync, which keeps the data in sync and it ensures we are doing the transforms that need to be done to the data,” Libutti said. “Having that single source of truth – knowing the data is in sync and valid – is our main focus and why we were so interested in investing in iPaaS.”
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.”
At Metropolitan State University, Ben Deneen, Director of Enterprise Information and Application Services, and his team are using TeamDynamix iPaaS to bring together several different systems for a cohesive workflow around security access.
As one of seven universities within Minnesota state, and one of 37 institutions as a whole, a lot of data is passed between systems across connected campuses, Deneen said. Another benefit of iPaaS is the ability to clean and transform the data going from one system to the next so automated processes can take place in the background and provide a seamless experience for students, faculty and employees at each of the campuses.
For example, Deneen said they use iPaaS to verify information and requests when it comes to opening buildings and classrooms using RFID technology for door access. They use the information gathered by a swipe of a card to check against permissions and identification information in Active Directory and Lenel (security software) to grant access to doors.
Using workflows built on the iPaaS platform, someone can swipe their ID at a door, and that will trigger a flow that bounces back to the security system to validate credentials, once clear it opens the door and then triggers the security camera at the door to record activity at that site. All of that information gets timestamped, collected and recorded so there’s a record of who is going in and out, and when.
There are similar flows between other apps and tools using RFID for parking garages and printing on printers on the campus, Deneen said.
Want to learn more about supercharging your ITSM? Check out our eBook Smart Service Management: Working Better Together with a Connected Enterprise
To learn more about iPaaS and the positive impact it can have on your organization check out this eBook: What is iPaaS and How Does It Accelerate Digital Transformation
This article was originally published in March 2022 and has been updated with new information.