Implementing the Entire Solution

With the three pieces in place, Hire a Hero was ready to begin the process of automating the data transfer. But there was a major problem from the get-go, namely the fact that YourMembership lacked an open API, and that meant XAware couldn't communicate directly with it to grab data. The solution involved generating a report manually, something they were hoping to avoid. Despite this, Selph says it still greatly simplified the data transfer and reduced the likelihood of an error during the data exchange. Even without the API, there was just a single file to deal with; and the XAware tool took care of all the difficult bits, such as field mapping, new field creation and duplicate records purging.

Recently, after prodding from its customers, including Hire a Hero, YourMembership has developed an API. Now XAware is working with Hire a Hero to complete the end-to-end data automation process. Selph has big plans for the future, including automating the process of collecting and updating jobs data, something Hire a Hero does manually at the moment, and XAware should scale as they grow and add additional data sources.

Selph advises other organizations undertaking similar projects to look beyond the surface of what a company does. As he points out, Salesforce.com is a CRM vendor, yet his company found ways to take advantage of its services, while YourMembership is typically used by alumni groups. "Be creative because the [SaaS vendor] may market themselves as one thing, but they could fit your [other] needs just as well." As Selph says, he's not managing a sales process or an alumni group, but he could look beyond this to see how these services apply to the needs of his organization and found a way to connect them.

A service-oriented architecture enabled a small four-person company with a huge job to build its business and communicate across different data sources. They may be small, but the lessons they learned about using a services model could apply to any organization trying to find ways to increase efficiency and cut costs.