Carmine Granucci

Assistant Director, Integration, Boston University

Supernova Award Category: 

Future of Work: Human Capital Management

The Organization: 

Founded in 1839, Boston University is one of the largest private universities in the United States. The university is also one of the largest private employers in Boston and has over 34,000 students.

The Problem: 

As a leader in academia, Boston University (BU) strives to provide an outstanding student experience in all aspects of students’ interactions with the university. Unfortunately, challenges with the University’s data architecture presented hurdles to students, faculty, and professional staff moving seamlessly from one system to another. The University relied heavily on the IT department to connect systems and automate processes like research operations, class scheduling, financial processes, building access, and others. In the admissions area, some processes relied on older technologies that were labor intensive for staff to maintain. In research, the faculty needed a more seamless connection between training systems and research compliance tracking. 

The Solution: 

Carmine A. Granucci, Associate Director, Integration at Boston University, and his team began evaluating different approaches to building integrations, migrating data to new cloud applications, and retiring legacy systems. Granucci wanted a standard integration approach for the university with the help of an integration platform as a service (iPaaS). His goal was to select an iPaaS that did not require hiring additional employees. The team needed to connect dozens of applications and systems and leverage cloud services like Amazon S3 and Aurora to facilitate the transformation and movement of data.

“We selected SnapLogic as our iPaaS because it enabled us to build codeless integrations and automate processes twice as fast as before by simply dragging and dropping Snaps together,” said Granucci. “We are now able to build and execute an integration within minutes.”

The Results: 

Once SnapLogic was deployed, IT was able to support the implementation of a new student recruitment and admissions system that is easier for staff to use and provides a more customized experience to applicants. When a prospective student submits an application, the student information system automatically generates a new record for each application in Salesforce.com, the university’s internal applications portal. 

Metrics: 
  • 50 percent time reduction in parsing through millions of rows of data  
  • Over $100,000 cost savings in Salesforce.com licenses
  • Improved customer connectivity experience and service

 

The Technology: 

SnapLogic’s Intelligent Integration Platform uses AI-powered workflows to automate all stages of IT integration projects – design, development, deployment, and maintenance – whether on-premises, in the cloud, or in hybrid environments. The platform’s self-service interface enables both expert and citizen integrators to manage all application integration, data integration, API management, B2B integration, and data engineering projects on a single, scalable platform.

Disruptive Factor: 

One of the main problems with the University’s data architecture lay in its approach to data integration. IT used a mix of homegrown ETL tools built out of Java and Pearl as well as a legacy data integration tool. They also created elaborate workarounds on the mainframes to complete integration tasks. These approaches required continuous manual support and maintenance. Despite having ETL and data integration tools, IT had to submit support tickets to their data integration vendor and manually write/rewrite code to fulfill integration requests whenever the data source code had to be changed. 

“We wrote code whenever there was a need to connect two or more applications or move files from one database to another,” said Carmine A. Granucci, Associate Director, Integration at Boston University. “We’d have a multistep process, and sometimes the data would appear empty or incomplete.”

Shining Moment: 

Granucci’s team also helped the research and operations departments with identity management. By using the SnapLogic LDAP Snap and exposing REST API calls, IT automated the process of giving authorized students, faculty, and staff access to secure information systems, facilities, and research laboratories. Also, IT helped the university’s Animal Science Center to grant authorized people access to its training and procedures.

About Boston University

Founded in 1839, Boston University is one of the largest private universities in the United States. The university is also one of the largest private employers in Boston and has over 34,000 students.