It’s a little known fact that data behaves a lot like a herd of cattle.
It needs to be herded by experts in order to get to the right places.
It can be compromised if that herding process isn’t being watched with an eagle eye.
And it can overwhelm anyone trying to handle it on their own, or even with a team.
So while a university CIO might not immediately think of themselves as a cowboy or cowgirl, in a sense, that’s exactly what they are. Movin’ data between apps and databases, and makin’ sure data quality remains high. Whether that means manual data transfer or custom coding, it’s expensive, time-consumin’, and frustratin’, carnsarn it!
If only the cowhands back in the day had had some way to automate cattle drives, life sure would have been a lot easier. Cattle moving smoothly from point to point on the trail, with no chance of mishaps, and no cowboy involvement required.
Well, gosh darn it, you know what’s funny? That’s exactly what N2N’s Illuminate platform provides for today’s CIO cowboys!
Just imagine how that old song Rawhide from the TV show might have sounded if CIOs had written it:
Rawhide: API Edition
Codin’ codin’ codin’
Codin’ codin’ codin’
Codin’ codin’ codin’
Codin’ codin’ codin’
APIs!
Custom codin’, codin’, codin’
The data streams are swollen
Keep them bits a-movin’, APIs!
With a SaaS app preoccupation
Hell bent for integration
Wishin’ N2N was by my side
All this custom codin’
They’d replace by simply loadin’
The Illuminate platform with APIs!
Move ’em on, head ’em up
Head ’em up, move ’em on
Move ’em on, head ’em up, APIs
Cut ’em out, write ’em in
Write ’em in, cut ’em out
Cut ’em out, Write ’em in, APIs
Keep movin’, movin’, movin’
Though the Budget Committee’s disapprovin’
Keep them bits a-movin’, APIs
Why not try to automate it,
At low cost so they won’t hate it?
Then you can stop with all this strife!
The Committee’s calculatin’
The N2N team will be waitin’
Be waitin’ by the phone when you decide.
Move ’em on, head ’em up
Head ’em up, move ’em on
Move ’em on, head ’em up, APIs
Cut ’em out, Write ’em in
Write ’em in, cut ’em out
Cut ’em out, Write ’em in, APIs
Codin’ codin’ codin’
Codin’ codin’ codin’
Codin’ codin’ codin’
Codin’ codin’ codin’
APIs!
You sure as heck don’t need to be out there moving that data around yourself, and neither does your team, trailboss! All you need to do is call N2N, and we’ll get you set up with our API Management Platform, Illuminate. Illuminate takes the hard work out of herding data, by integrating all your apps, databases, and systems seamlessly and effortlessly, in no time flat. Data quality is assured, and the monthly cost is less than the cost of hiring a decent cook for your chuck wagon, guaranteed!
Growing up, did you ever see the Mickey Mouse cartoon The Brave Little Tailor? The one where Mickey takes on a giant who’s wreaking havoc all around the countryside, sitting on farmhouses, downing handfuls of pumpkins like they’re candy, and smoking haystack cigars?
Well, Disney’s take on the story was based on one of Grimm’s fairy tales, called Seven At One Blow, which tells the tale of an eminently resourceful tailor who comes up with unique solutions to a series of challenges and eventually ends up as king.
The story starts with the tailor gleefully boasting about the fact that he unexpectedly managed to swat 7 flies at once, to keep a pie safe – but of course, his “seven at one blow” is misunderstood, and lands him in all kinds of sticky situations, which result in him besting several giants, an evil unicorn, a murderous wild boar, the army, and even the king, all by using his wits and the various items in his pockets.
You could say his kingdom had its share of problems – and pretty unique ones at that. Have you ever heard of an evil unicorn before?
At N2N, we like to think of ourselves as similar in some ways to that gallant tailor.
Because here’s the thing.
Every college, every university, has a unique IT set-up, a unique way of doing things, and unique challenges and problems they’re looking to overcome.
Maybe they use Banner, PowerCampus, or Colleague. Or maybe they use PeopleSoft, CampusVue, or Jenzabar. They might use Canvas, Blackboard, Moodle, or D2L…Salesforce…Oracle…or any number of other shiny new SaaS apps or creaky old legacy systems.
So many different configuration possibilities – and so many different issues with integrating all those myriad programs.
That’s where we come in.
And fell seven with one blow.
At N2N, we’re not just a one-hit wonder. We’re a one-stop shop.
With a single solution – our API Management Platform, Illuminate – we can help any institution with any integration challenge.
Don’t believe us? Toss a few giants our way and then stand back and watch.
We’re official partners of Ellucian, Oracle, Modo Labs, Front Rush, Coursedog, ACI, MTFX, and Northstar – just to name a few.
We’ve helped entire states create innovative new ways to serve their millions of community college or state university students, like Florida and California.
We’ve helped whole community college districts revamp and streamline their processes to save resources and boost productivity.
Whether we’re swatting flies or cornering evil unicorns, N2N’s Illuminate platform doesn’t just help with one problem, or one system – we can help you with all of them, in one fell swoop.
It doesn’t matter where your integration needs start or end or what you want to integrate – Illuminate has a place in your integration strategy no matter what.
It’ll help you make business decisions. It’ll boost your bottom line. It’ll pave the way to your future, while saving you time and money, they said.
How’s that working out for ya?
Sure, in a perfect world, your data warehouse would be humming along just fine, assimilating data from multiple different sources, assuring data quality, and giving you analytical insights you can take to the bank.
But in reality? You’re most likely dealing with hassle after hassle, headache after headache.
Oh, those were duplicate records? Darn…
Wait, we’re missing data? How did that happen?
You mean we based those projections and strategies on incomplete or faulty data? Oh no!
The hard truth is, your data warehouse is useless – and worse than useless, harmful – if the data quality is poor.
But for such a mammoth system as a data warehouse, what complex measures would have to be taken in order to fix all the issues?
Well, you could pay programmers to custom code your way out of the mess, consuming resources and probably still not getting quite the solution you were hoping for…
Or you could try a simple, quick, affordable, and elegant solution instead – the Illuminate platform.
Illuminate is an API Management Platform that can integrate all your data feeds, all your shiny new SaaS apps and your creaky legacy systems, and get all that information flowing into your data warehouse effortlessly – and flawlessly – in real-time. Data quality is not an issue, because Illuminate can sort data based on any parameters you choose, to filter out duplicates or errors, and transform or mask data from the source system before sending to the warehouse.
Sound too good to be true?
The reason Illuminate can do all this so quickly and easily is that it comes prebuilt with API building blocks that anyone can intuitively snap together in minutes to build those connections. That’s right – anyone. Not just programmers or IT professionals – anyone. In minutes.
Of course, if you’ve got a data warehousing set-up that you’d prefer professional help with, we here at N2N are more than happy to oblige. We can work with you to make sure Illuminate is configured exactly according to your needs, connecting the right apps and data feeds into your data warehouse, and ensuring data quality.
We’ve done that for many clients, such as Dunwoody College of Technology, where we integrated Ellucian PowerCampus with Macmillan Learning to enable automated, scheduled SIS to SaaS web-service transfers and also allow for easy .CSV data extraction.
We did it for Waubonsee Community College, which needed a way to ensure data quality and prevent duplicate records.
We’re currently working with the California Community College System and the Florida Virtual Campus to implement the infrastructure for each institution in their systems to provide real-time data exchange for course searches and a cross enrollment application to allow students from any campus to search and register for online classes offered by any other campus.
And we can help your institution with your needs, too. Whether that’s populating a data warehouse or integrating applications to one another.
Just fill out this quick contact form and we can set up a free demo. We’d love to chat about your data warehousing needs, and show you exactly what we can do for you.
It’s a phrase we often associate with cooking – but wouldn’t it be nice to be able to apply that same concept to your institution’s data transfer needs?
Dunwoody College of Technology in Minneapolis, Minnesota, thought so.
We first met the folks from Dunwoody at Ellucian Live 2018, when they stopped by the N2N booth to chat.
They told us about the complex processes they currently had in place to transfer data between Ellucian PowerCampus and Macmillan Learning, and the monster queries they had to run in order to generate data files.
They were using a web-based system with extremely technical layers between interfaces – a system that required users to manually choose all of the parameters each time they ran queries against the database. This system was expensive and time-consuming – first of all, because users had to include so many criteria in each query, and secondly, because its output came in the form of multiple different tables, from which users would then have to glean the data that they then needed to import into Macmillan Learning.
To make matters worse, this process had to be repeated all the time, since there were a huge number of data elements that users needed to import from PowerCampus – this system was really eating up their resources!
We were thrilled to be able to tell them about our flagship product, the Illuminate API Management Platform, which enables automated, scheduled SIS to SaaS web-service transfers, and also allows for easy .csv data extraction, without the need for coding or time-consuming manual queries and data transfer.
N2N worked with Dunwoody to integrate Ellucian PowerCampus with Macmillan Learning and automate the transfer of attendance data, as well as midterm and final grades, on a daily basis. We integrated them for both .csv extracts and scheduled SIS to SaaS web-service transfers.
Debra Marsolek, Senior IT Business Analyst at Dunwoody, explained that Illuminate had relieved a huge burden for them, refining their deeper technical process and making it more efficient. With 1280 students to keep tabs on, a streamlined process makes a huge difference in terms of time and money spent on data management.
With regard to N2N’s customer service, Debra said, “They were very responsive – they got back to us right away on things! We had weekly meetings, which was great, where we each had action items. I never felt like anyone lost track of where they were at; they were all very on top of it. They carried the load to make it all happen. They were great! We can’t thank them enough – we so appreciate the work they did.”
And now that it’s been a while since we helped Dunwoody get all set up? Debra said, “Now, everything is set up and working fine. We were looking at our logs – and there were no errors! It’s running smoothly. It’s truly ‘set it and forget it,’ because we know it’s running and working.”
If your institution would like help with PowerCampus integrations of any kind, give N2N a call today – or come see us this spring at Ellucian Live 2019! We’d love to chat.
OK, let’s be honest – how long do your New Year’s resolutions usually last?
Are you out the door at 5 am on January 1 (fine, maybe January 2) for your new morning jogging regimen – only to decide on January 7or so that the health benefits of getting more sleep outweigh those of a morning run?
Do you buy out the health food section of the store every January – but then end up tossing most of it weeks later, once you realize you never really liked tofu after all, or conclude that carbs can’t possibly be all that bad?
So why do we keep making those resolutions, year after year, in spite of our recurrent willpower struggles?
It may be the champagne…but then again, it may be the fact that most resolutions are truly worthy goals that will bring positive changes in our lives long-term.
With that in mind, it stands to reason that taking some time to make a few New Year’s resolutions at your organization would be a useful exercise, as well (one that probably shouldn’t involve too much champagne, though…).
And bonus – with the combined willpower of everyone in your organization, along with the processes and structure that can be put in place to support those new resolutions, you’re a lot more likely to follow through and actually reach those goals.
So what kinds of resolutions should your organization be making?
Of course, everyone wants to boost profits, reduce costs, streamline processes, and improve outcomes. But starting with big, nebulous goals like that is a surefire way to get nowhere fast. Planning several concrete actions your organization will take in one specific area of business is a much more effective way to approach your New Year’s resolutions.
And what area of business is more all-encompassing – and has more of an influence on every other aspect of your organization – than data management?
Refining and updating your data management strategy – or putting one in place, if you don’t have an integrated, comprehensive one yet – is the single most beneficial thing you can do for your organization in 2019. From productivity to costs to growth, your data management plan affects every important goal your organization has.
Just like your own personal resolutions, the following 3 data management goals are all about making positive changes that lead to increased wellbeing long-term:
Get Organized (Create or Update Your Data Management Strategy)
First things first. Just as getting organized in your private life helps you reduce stress, prioritize what’s important, and get things done more efficiently and effectively, putting a data management strategy in place helps your organization do the same. Your plan should take into account current needs and resources, as well as expectations for the future, and should make every element of data management at your organization an integrated, intentional choice that supports the goals of the strategy as a whole.
Eat Healthier (Ensure Data Quality)
As the Coca-Cola Company reminds us, Put Good In, Get Good Out (which is a little ironic, but we’ll leave that alone for now). The principle is true, however – just like eating better gives us more energy and improves our health, ensuring data quality results in better organizational health, creating better outcomes for both your customers (or students, in the case of higher ed) and your bottom line. Eliminating duplicate records, for example, can mean more accurate and effective communication – which will ultimately result in growth.
Save Money (Streamline Data Management Processes)
Everybody wants to save more money – and just like cutting back and budgeting helps an individual take control of their finances, streamlining your data management processes makes a huge difference in productivity, costs, and efficiency for your organization. If you can easily automate a process, why waste resources doing it manually? Look into solutions that will allow you to streamline, and thus boost your bottom line.
Have we convinced you to make some data management resolutions at your organization?
Then let us give you one more pro tip.
You know what the single easiest way to hit all three of these goals is?
Partnering with N2N, and using our Illuminate API management platform and our IDMatch data quality assurance module to provide a comprehensive data management solution.
Using the Illuminate platform is a data management strategy in and of itself, giving your organization the agility to integrate, test, change out, and add in any apps, databases, and other systems you want, in minutes and without coding, now and in the future. And IDMatch ensures data quality, preventing duplicate records by streamlining the data review process.
With these tools in place, your organization will be poised to take on the new year like never before.
So what are you waiting for? Resolve to give N2N a call today. And after we chat? Then you can break out that champagne! It’s gonna be a great year.
