Credit: Flinders University
Flinders University has embarked on a five-year digital strategy with Dell Boomi, using the platform–as-a-service (PaaS) company’s integration tools to enable a connected environment.
Specifically, the Adelaide-based University will leverage its integration platform-as-a-service (iPaaS) solution to enable a connected environment as it begins to execute its digital strategy through to 2021.
According to the University, the primary objective driving the University’s strategy is to provide a personalised and customised education experience to each of its 26,000 students throughout their entire journey – from prospect to graduate, and it is migrating its applications to the cloud to enable this.
The first major project involves the migration of its Student Management System (SMS), which handles all 26,000 students, to a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model.
The project will require more than 100 Boomi integration points to replace legacy integrations that were coded up to 10 years ago.
Flinders University selected Boomi following a tender process, in which it went to market looking for a combination of traditional enterprise service bus (ESB)-style integration, application programming interfaces (APIs), and master data management (MDM).
It said Dell Boomi was the only company that could provide these capabilities in a “true cloud” environment as competing products only offered managed services, with software located on-premises and fed through a third party data centre.
Flinders University information and digital solutions architect, Kelvin McCarthy, said introducing cloud-based apps is just the first step in its digital transformation. He said it needs a way to connect those apps with one another to provide a unified experience for users, and that’s where Boomi comes in.
“Flinders’ digital strategy will result in the widespread use of cloud services to optimise and enhance learning for our students no matter the study they are completing,” he said.
“Boomi’s integration capabilities ensure these apps operate concurrently and consistently so that students can learn through a modernised environment that is accessible on their terms – on mobile, at any time, and from any location.”
Future phases of the project will see the University leverage the Boomi MDM Cloud, managed from the same Boomi integration platform, to to aggregate student data from multiple sources, ensuring data is consistent and up-to-date across a diverse range of applications regardless of where the data was initially collected.
As well as creating an automated, central data repository, these MDM capabilities will also play a prominent part in its adoption of learning analytics.
“We have… a plethora of applications which contain chunks of information about every student. That’s a lot of data, and if it isn’t synchronised, it can cause significant conflicts. With Boomi, we can have confidence in data accuracy as all information stored by our apps will be handled by the MDM platform in the cloud.
“This type of accuracy and real-time access helps us better understand the student journey, and will become increasingly important the further we progress along our digital roadmap,” McCarthy mentioned.
Dell Boomi Asia-Pacific and Japan managing director, Michael Evans, added that today’s students, most of whom would be digital natives, expect more than competency-based learning.
“They want a unique, tech-enabled experience that fits their aspirations and is shaped around their schedules,” he said.
“Using Boomi’s cloud-native platform to connect applications and maintain data integrity, Flinders can analyse the needs of its students and seamlessly align the learning experiences it offers to those demands.”
Dell Boomi most recently acquired software development platform, ManyWho, in a bid to expand its application and data integration capabilities.
