Flinders University turns to Dell Boomi for connected cloud
Adelaide's Flinders University has announced that it is using the Dell Boomi integration platform-as-a-service (iPaaS) to enable a connected environment as it begins to execute its five-year digital strategy through to 2021.
The primary objective of the university's strategy is to provide a personalised and customised education experience to each of its 26,000 students from prospect through to graduation, and is migrating its applications to the cloud to enable the transformation.
Flinders University will leverage the Boomi Master Data Management (MDM) Cloud, managed from the same Boomi integration platform, cleaning its data to accurately map the student's university tenure.
"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," said Kelvin McCarthy, acting associate director of Information and Digital Services at Flinders University.
"But introducing cloud-based apps is just the first step. We need a way to connect those apps with one another so we can provide a unified experience for users."
Flinders University selected Boomi following a tender process in which it went to market looking for a combination of traditional enterprise service bus-style integration, APIs, and MDM.
Having already completed various minor back-end integrations, Flinders University's first major project involves the migration of its Student Management System (SMS) from on-premises to a software-as-a-service (SaaS) version. The project will require more than 100 Boomi integration points to replace legacy integrations that were coded up to 10 years ago, Boomi explained.
Future phases of Flinders University's Boomi project will see it use the Boomi MDM Cloud to aggregate student data from multiple sources.
"If we can't understand the student, what stage in their learning journey they are, and what they need, we can't optimise the services we offer them, nor can we propose further opportunities," McCarthy explained.
"We have the Student Management System, Learning Management System, alumni management system, and a plethora of other 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."
As well as creating an automated central data repository, these MDM capabilities will play a prominent part in Flinders University's adoption of learning analytics as it works toward becoming a world leader in the practice by 2025, McCarthy said.