CHARLES STURT University (CSU) is using the Dell Boomi integration platform to enhance student and staff experiences and to help refresh of the university’s core applications as part of a five-year information technology (IT) transformation.

Dell Boomi is acting as an integration platform to improve CSU’s business capability and underpin a strategic renewal of core systems in a process that should support strategic decision making, according to CSU’s IT Division executive director, Tim Mannes.

“We developed our enterprise systems renewal program in order to speed up the delivery of new resources for our stakeholders,” Mr Mannes said.

“To successfully execute on our objectives, however, we seriously needed a reliable, seamless and highly-integrated flow of information across our new enterprise environment. That’s the strategic background to our implementation of the Boomi platform.” 

CSU is a regional university with more than 40,000 students enrolled across 10 campuses and online. In 2017, it initiated an IT modernisation project with the aim of improving its business agility and to develop and roll out student and staff services efficiently.

Mr Mannes said the ‘cloud native’ Boomi integration platform-as-a-service (iPaaS) served as the linking mechanism between all of CSU’s renewed operational systems. This included customer relationship management (CRM), human resources (HR), finance, research, student management system (SMS), data warehouse and identity management platforms, as well any bespoke applications to be incorporated in the future.

Mr Mannes said by underpinning those applications, Boomi facilitated a central data repository that makes it possible for CSU to capture consistent and reliable information that can be analysed for better business insights. These insights would help the university make strategic decisions to overcome prominent industry challenges.

In particular, he said, the data consolidated through Boomi would help CSU combat attrition by proactively identifying priority students – those who may be struggling in their courses – in order to engage them early and guide them to improved outcomes during their learning journey.

Boomi is also being used to strip away complexity from CSU’s IT environment, being built on a ‘low-code’ design.

Mr Mannes said this should make it quick and easy for CSU to create and manage integrations controlling the need for dedicated specialised coding experts. It also reduced the need for the heavy maintenance that is inherent in legacy, on-premises integration technologies.

“The move to Boomi’s iPaaS has given us a high-reliability environment for business continuity,” CSU IT Division integration manager, Shane Jeffries said.

“While we have been using integration for a decade, our old integration platform made upgrades difficult, and required a lot of resources to maintain – combined, it demanded a serious amount of effort that impeded our focus on what’s most important: the experiences of students and staff.”

CSU’s decision to deploy the Boomi integration platform-as-a-service (iPaaS) over other providers followed a market evaluation and discussions with fellow Australian universities, including Deakin University and Flinders University.

“The higher education space is hotly-contested in Australia, with universities under constant pressure to differentiate themselves to existing and prospective students by demonstrating innovative services,” Boomi Asia-Pacific and Japan managing director Michael Evans said.

“By connecting systems and operations with Boomi’s platform, CSU is in a better position to understand its students than ever before.

“As a connected university with digital services, processes and insights, the organisation can optimise its investments in the resources that students need most, ultimately providing students a better learning experience that will enhance their suitability in the workforce of tomorrow.”

www.boomi.com

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SWINBURNE University of Technology is developing a ‘hybrid cloud’ aimed at eliminating time-consuming and administrative tasks for its IT team and final year students. 

Swinburne is using Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS software to provide an efficient, self-service experience to its technology students for their final year projects.

Melbourne-based Swinburne University of Technology is well regarded globally for its commitment to providing an education to sections of society otherwise denied further education, including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. 

The Swinburne curriculum focuses heavily on technology and its IT team was looking for a way to deliver easy-to-use services to students through infrastructure that enabled the university to scale and automate those services.  

Swinburne deployed the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS software to provide an efficient, self-service experience to the technology students for their final year projects.

The self-service portal works like an application store, where students can browse, choose and deploy the IT solution they need for their final year projects with a single click, including complex mobile application development programs.

The students are also able to take advantage of other automated services, such as quickly procuring more storage when they need it. Behind the scenes, the Swinburne IT team uses Nutanix Calm to automate these processes and also migrate workloads and apps between cloud environments.

Prior to this latest deployment, building the infrastructure needed to support student requests could take weeks and months, according to Swinburne IT director of infrastructure and operations, Simon Naughton.

He said the process had previously created extra work for the IT team and the students had to wait a long time before they could start their programming projects. In addition, keeping up with IT requests from students required the manual and time-consuming task of setting up infrastructure in response to their needs, he said.

“We selected Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS software because it supports our hybrid cloud strategy of migrating workloads back and forth between public cloud and on-premises without having to think about it,” Mr Naughton said.

“However, the real benefit is for the students. Nutanix and our IT partner, Thomas Duryea Logicalis, help us keep Swinburne students focused on researching and developing the applications they are building, which ultimately provides them with a better education.” 

The experience so far has been that, using Nutanix, Swinburne spends less time on provisioning services and the students themselves are more satisfied with IT support and more productive in their studies.

“Universities across Australia, and particularly technology universities, are growing fast, and students expect the right digital resources to be in place to support their education,” Nutanix senor vice president and head of the Asia-Pacific region, Matt Young said.

“Swinburne understands this trend and has found a simple, modern way to use the hybrid cloud and ensure their students’ attention is focused on their education, not technology requests.

“With the Nutanix software, all the key elements for success are fully integrated into one simple solution.”

www.nutanix.com

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CO-OPERATELY owned digital platforms will receive a ‘leg-up’ against the technology giants from a new approach by the Business Council of Co-operatives and Mutuals (BCCM), supported by a US$1 million Google grant.

The Google grant is devoted to creating open-source platform technology for worker-owners and BCCM is partnering with global Platform Co-op Consortia to help enable Australian workers to participate fairly in the digitally-enabled economy.

“This new Platform Co-op Development Kit will mean aspiring groups like care workers can access software templates and best legal practices to create their own sharing economies instead of settling for exploitation on the existing options,” BCCM CEO Melina Morrison said. 

Ms Morrison said it was an economic anomaly that while platforms such as Uber, Deliveroo, Freelancer and Foodora do not own what they sell, they keep the profits of the exchange between supplier and user “because they own the rights to the technology underpinning the exchange”.

According to Ms Morrison, platform co-operatives are owned by the workers or producers, “so the profits of their labour return to them”.

Google.org and Harvard University are providing key technical expertise via open source work for the new Platform Co-op Development Kit so that platform co-ops can create their own platform exchanges.

“Co-operatively owned platforms are needed urgently to address the power imbalance between the people who do the work on platforms and the owners of the platforms,” Ms Morrison said.

“Employee ownership and community ownership gives workers and communities the chance to harness technological changes to the local economy as players, not passive participants.”

BCCM member and carer co-operative This Cooperative Life is a pilot case in the Platform Co-op Development Kit program.

“In areas like social care, platform co-ops deliver agency and empowerment for workers and high quality and consistent services for consumers of disability and aged care,” Ms Morrison said.

“But their potential use is much more varied and wide.”

This initiative is a big win for the cooperative movement “and for platform co-op pioneers all over the world,” said associate professor Trebor Scholz, a platform co-operative expert and founder of the Platform Cooperative Consortia.

“The Kit will make it easier to start and run platform co-ops,” Prof. Scholz said. “It will also provide an interactive map of the co-op ecosystem and essential community-edited resources.”

Developers will begin the first stage of the platform development kit in July and the partnership will then look to build out-data services, job training, legal templates and consultancy services for emerging platform co-ops.

“By embedding the traditional co-operative principles of fairness and community in digital technology, the Platform Co-op Development Kit will seriously challenge the established players in the sharing economy,” Ms Morrison said. “It will make it easier instead for Australian workers to become our newest entrepreneurs and start their own labour-sharing platforms.

“The Australian co-operative sector, which counts 2000 businesses and eight-in-10 Australians as members, is proud to be a part of this important initiative through our support for the Platform Cooperative Consortium.”

www.bccm.coop

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TECHNOLOGYONE has announced its new Single Touch Payroll functionality, to meet new Australian Tax Office (ATO) requirements in reporting employees payroll information.

Single Touch Payroll (STP) was introduced by the Australian Government for organisations with 20 or more employees, with effect from July 1, 2018.

With the support of the ATO, TechnologyOne has adopted a controlled rollout for customers, enabling them to integrate STP into their businesses between  July 1, 2018, and April 30, 2019. 

TechnologyOne CEO Edward Chung said this approach would minimise disruption on customers’ day-to-day operations, by extending the STP compliance deadline away from the end-of-year time frame.

“STP signifies a marked shift, requiring employers to report employee year-to-date payroll data to the ATO, directly from their payroll solution, each time they pay their employees,” Mr Chung said.

“Our STP functionality is an integrated part of our enterprise solution, meaning customers don’t need to worry about expensive middleware or gateway providers, and complex integrations.

“Payroll information will be delivered directly from our software to the ATO via our secure SaaS platform, so customers – both on premise and SaaS – will benefit from the superior security we build at every level of our leading-edge SaaS solution.”

Mr Chung said TechnologyOne worked in partnership with the ATO to roll out STP functionality “in a considered, safe and secure manner, to reduce risk for customers”.

“We’ve taken this approach to provide a smooth upgrade path for customers and minimise the operational impact on their organisations,” he said.

“TechnologyOne’s solution has been built on the latest ATO specifications. By working in close collaboration with the ATO, our Human Resource and Payroll software is now recognised as a government-approved solution, providing customers with a secure and compliant system to meet the ATO’s legislative changes.

“In keeping with our ‘Power of One’ promise, we’ve taken responsibility for both delivering the solution and ensuring a successful implementation, making us completely invested in our customers’ STP compliance.”

www.technologyonecorp.com

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