Case Studies

To deliver on its responsibilities of providing streamlined services and eliminating redundancies, the DES embarked on an initiative to reengineer the way the State does business. Doug Buster, data & business intelligence manager, explained, “The concept of ‘lean government’ is core to the whole mission of this agency and is a phrase that encapsulates everything we do. To achieve this, part of our vision is to create an ‘integration as a service’ capability across the organization, with a mechanism to facilitate the efficient exchange of data between all of our disparate systems.

“One of our first projects relating to the vision involved the ‘Time, Leave and Attendance’ (TLA) application, which as its name suggests, helps monitor and manage the time-keeping records for the all state’s government workers.”

Donna Edwards, enterprise architect for the DES, added, “Data used by the TLA system is common to many other applications and relevant to multiple agencies; we knew that improving its efficiency would have immediate and widespread benefits, and also serve as the blueprint for how we want to integrate data across our enterprise applications.

“The pre-TLA application architecture relied on a predominantly manual process to exchange data between the agency’s financial reporting system and the human resource management system [HRMS]. In the past, the exchange of account codes was only performed on a nightly basis; creating delays with configuring new accounts and resulting in possible re-work if the required record was not available when needed. The process could take two or three days to complete and was the source of frequent errors.”

An additional attraction to leading with the TLA conversion was that the diversity of data sources used by the application was very representative of the overall DES environment. Buster commented,
“The finance system is several decades old, written in COBOL running on an IBM mainframe and this is frequently required to interact with the HRMS, which is SAP-based and deployed on a Microsoft Windows infrastructure. We also needed to add SQL data feeds and another SQL end-point from the mainframe; all together, quite a challenging disparity in architecture, era, and agility!”

Integrating the TLA application with the Informatica Hub yielded instant benefits. An HRMS business process that previously used to take multiple days to run now finishes in just a couple of minutes. Linda Kent, communications manager, commented, “What this represents is very significant, especially from the perspective of our employees: They get registered for payroll pretty much instantly and the HR team doesn’t need to spend the time it used to on performing the task. Also, automating the process greatly reduces the potential for error and subsequent rework.”

Buster noted, “The Data Integration Hub also helps with reducing risk for us: The agility of being able to service all the requests for data with much less concern about IT resourcing constraints, definitely mitigates any possible impact to project timing.”

A key feature of the Data Integration Hub is the capability for an application to publish data once, and make this available to multiple subscribers; ensuring data consistency and alleviating the need write individual point-to-point interfaces. Edwards commented, “We look at the Hub as laying the foundation for exciting things to come. Now that we are publishing our financial codes we can efficiently replace all of the point-to-point interfaces that use that information. We now have the ability to subscribe to any of those applications and provide the data to the subscribing applications in near real-time, in a format that is usable for that system. It ensures that all applications and all users get the same data; people don’t have to build their own processes between two applications anymore. We’re able to minimize the work needed to interconnect two applications. And the same applies to workflows; the Hub enables us to remove redundant workflows and ensures that we are using consistent data across our application portfolio.

“Without this tool in house, people would be spending a large amount of time designing how their applications access data and how they integrate within the environment, and this is all before they actually have to build the solution. DIH greatly improves our ‘time to market’ capabilities and the speed with which we can deliver a working application.”

Kent stated, “Our agency is always focused on getting the very best returns from our technology investments and on continuous improvement. DIH allows us to achieve this and to utilize the skills and expertize we’ve already built up. A lot of people are really excited about the potential of this tool.”

He summarized, “Expectations and the pace of business are both increasing, and we want to respond by delivering faster, more consistently and with higher levels of quality. The diversity of the systems we have – from our COBOL applications through to cloud-based SaaS suites – can be challenging but the Informatica Data Integration Hub is the ‘glue’ that’s helping us to achieve precisely what we want.”