Client:
Our client is an emerging mobile-oriented event ticketing platform. To support their rapid growth, they adopted Workato to build workflow automations that drive efficiency and optimize customer and employee experiences.
Challenge:
As an early adopter of Workato, our client is a strong believer in the value of workflow automation in a rapidly growing business. They have formed a small, core team that has delivered dozens of automation solutions for various parts of the business. While they were very successful with their automation strategy, they came to Dispatch with two specific requests:
1. Implementation of an automation governance model. As the company was looking forward to a potential IPO, they needed to be sure all of their IT infrastructure and processes met high standards for security, auditability, and controls.
2. The addition of surge capacity to meet growing integration solution demand. While the core team was very efficient and competent, the volume of automation requests from across the business was growing, and the team was looking to Dispatch to provide additional on-demand capacity to design and build integrations as needed.
Solution:
Dispatch conducted a governance diagnostic review of the current integration governance model in place. We leveraged our experience working with other Workato clients that needed to be SOX compliant or had other governance requirements. We also put in place a lightweight engagement model that enabled our client to get help from our team quickly and on-demand when there were unique integration requirements or surges in activity that we could support.
- Automation Governance Model:
- Workato has some strong integration portfolio management tools and good event and access logging. In addition to the core capabilities, we recommended the following enhancements:
- Automated reporting: by understanding auditor requirements, the client can automate the generation of reports needed to comply with both internal and external audit cycles. This improves the efficiency of the audit and significantly improves the likelihood of audit results with no negative findings.
- Development of a centralized error handling system. We recommend transitioning to a common, callable error-handling approach to manage, communicate and report on incidents. A centralized error handler ensures all recipes have a common and trusted method to detect and log errors as well as automated alerting for remediation. In this case, the error handler manages ticket creation, classification, and notifications via Jira, which provides traceability and logging of incidents and errors.
- Development of a centralized job catalog in Jira. By creating and managing an integration catalog in Jira, the client has a single source of truth regarding the number and types of integrations in production, including their attributes and revision history.
- Log Streaming. We recommended connecting Workato to DataDog to create a persistent and immutable log of integration runs, events, errors, and other attributes.
- These changes, along with some enhancements in the process for design, move-to-production, and change management approvals resulted in improved governance and control for the expanding integration catalog.
- Workato has some strong integration portfolio management tools and good event and access logging. In addition to the core capabilities, we recommended the following enhancements:
- Surge Capacity:
- Dispatch developers were engaged to build and enhance integrations as a support resource for the core client team. Projects were assigned to Dispatch based on available internal capacity. These projects included building out several of the governance model recommendations (such as centralized error handling) and also included integration builds and enhancements to support business processes in HR, finance, and sales. These projects included:
- Salesforce – Jira
- Greenhouse – Workday
- Ultipro Payroll – NetSuite
- Coupa – NetSuite
- Workato – Datadog
- Dispatch developers were engaged to build and enhance integrations as a support resource for the core client team. Projects were assigned to Dispatch based on available internal capacity. These projects included building out several of the governance model recommendations (such as centralized error handling) and also included integration builds and enhancements to support business processes in HR, finance, and sales. These projects included:
Outcome
The client now has confidence that their integration catalog has sufficient governance controls and reporting to meet future audit requirements. As a byproduct of this governance work, new integrations can be built faster and with a more standardized and scalable approach. The client has also been able to augment and enhance their internal capabilities with Dispatch resources to build and enhance integrations, which has increased their build velocity and responsiveness to business demands.
