Northwoods customers—child welfare caseworkers—deal with massive amounts of documents, paperwork, and forms needed to fulfill government requirements. It's case information that can exceed thousands of pages, much of it in paper format, that's been collected over time by various individuals. It was nearly impossible for any caseworker to know everything that's in the file to be able to properly serve their clients and make critical decisions about child safety. It's what Northwoods calls dark data, hidden or virtually impossible to retrieve.

Northwoods developed Traverse, a system of engagement for workers that brings together all the case history into an easily digestible and interactive view. The company then wanted an integration platform that would allow the solution to easily integrate with customers' other data sources including case management and document management systems. The platform needed to allow centralized account management and provide data in easy-to-access digital format. It sought an iPaaS with the ability to monitor accounts and provide the performance needed to help caseworkers perform data discovery.

"We wanted an easy-to-use product rather than something that required a more complex skill set," said Greg Davis, senior solution architect.

The company turned to TIBCO Cloud™ Integration for several reasons, including its ease of use, market share, and pricing. Additionally, the Northwoods team was impressed with the choice of iPaaS connectors and the way TIBCO responded to support concerns. Both TIBCO Cloud Integration and the Traverse application are hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

"Caseworkers are able to see more about the case in a very readily available format," said Davis. "They’re able to discover information they couldn't find before."

Savings in Time and Money

With TIBCO Cloud Integration, Northwoods integrates customer systems much faster. "Our data integration time-to-market now has been reduced by about 25% for new customers. For a new customer that has a system of record that we've already integrated, the time to market has been dramatically reduced, I'd say by about 75% because we literally can just clone the solution, change a few variables, and now, this new customer is up and going," said Davis.

The Traverse solution's companion mobile application, also hosted on AWS, allows caseworkers to easily access all their case data when meeting with clients, saving about two hours each day, time they can now spend on better serving families.

"Caseworkers can go from a pretty archaic system of managing cases to something that's digital," said Davis.

Centralized Management

The centralized monitoring and management of TIBCO Cloud Integration gives Northwoods a single point of reference for gaining visibility into its system.

"With the iPaaS, it's a lot easier now. Before, it would be fairly time-consuming to manage each one of our customer environments," said Davis.

Clear Visibility into Case Data

When there's caseworker turnover, it's important for those new workers to come up to speed as quickly as possible. With the Traverse solution powered by TIBCO Cloud Integration, they can easily access information, and quickly understand the needs of each child and family—the history, medical or legal events, and who's been in their life. This means caseworkers can spend more time focusing on the people they serve and making informed decisions, and less on searching for information.

"We're evaluating a lot of that data, we're digitizing it, we're using optical character recognition, we're running some artificial intelligence against it to identify characteristics about those documents and get that data to be more visible in our system. Securely sharing that data across various systems is exactly what we use TIBCO for," said Davis.

"The overarching goal is that many more individuals within our organization will have the ability to monitor, implement, suggest changes, and understand the TIBCO data integration solution better than the old method, which was overly complex," said Davis. "We know that there's going to be continued investment in this product. We'll have access to many talented people. It's pretty exciting."