TASC is a third-party benefits administrator offering employee services like flexible spending accounts and health benefits accounts as well as HR services, such as COBRA administration. The Wisconsin-based company has grown tremendously in recent years from small origins, and it now boasts more than 60,000 clients ranging from Fortune 500 firms to micro businesses. When Karl Richards joined TASC as CIO two years ago, he recognized a need for process automation in the midst of the rapid growth. In an interview with FierceCIO, Richards discussed how process automation has helped the company in its effort to continuously launch new products and features for its customers.

FierceCIO: What was the impetus for deploying process automation tools?

Karl Richards: The pressure ultimately came from TASC growing significantly year after year. When I joined, it was at one of those points. The complexity of the infrastructure and the complexity of applications were growing. When I looked at the infrastructure, what I didn't see was centralized control or centralized oversight. If we didn't address this issue soon, it would probably be an untenable situation a few years down the road. 

The way we serve our customers is through our website. We have a web portal for over 600,000 customers. However, we also still need to cut checks. There is still the necessity for batch processing, and that was the area I was looking at for automation originally. With tools from UC4 Software, I have a single console so we can watch over our production batch. We can call for help if it runs into trouble. We're now running almost five nines in terms of finishing our batch on schedule.

As we went along, we moved into automating our production build process as well. It used to be a very manual process. With UC4 we were able to automate that process, and it's really slashed our rollout time. We're trying to get to almost a continuous integration cycle, but we're not quite there yet. We've also automated many of our EDI processes.    

What is interesting about this experience is that we went out looking for a jobs scheduling tool and we ended up acquiring a real process automation tool. 

FCIO: What feedback have you had from your staff?

Richards: When we brought in the tool, I had to twist a lot of arms. It was typical of change management. But it didn't take long for the team to take it and run with it.

My vision was to automate the batch, but what my team came back with was automation of the whole build process. Those were ideas that just came out of it when they saw what it can do.

FCIO: What were some of the labor-intensive tasks you replaced with this technology?

Richards: We had a number of different point tools for jobs scheduling. I might have had some Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) jobs running based on Windows Scheduler. We had a scheduler that we used with our Java applications. We were using good old cron as our Linux scheduler. If something didn't work right, pinpointing the problem was challenging. More and more, we need to orchestrate between different servers, platforms and operating systems. We have 45,000 users on our site on any given day. We pride ourselves on customer service and being fast. With UC4, we were able to bring it all together.    

FCIO: How did you choose among the different process automation offerings?

Richards: There are a few large and well-established incumbents, a few up-and-coming companies, and some smaller, unknown solutions. We really wanted something that could be well-supported and very flexible. As you look at the market for this, some of the established vendors that come out of the mainframe world carry with that a lot off baggage and price points that don't always look good for the mid-sized market.    

FCIO: Is there anything you wish the technology could do that it doesn't do now?

Richards: We're moving more and more into the cloud all the time. We're implementing an ERP system in the cloud right now, and we're beginning to work with Amazon UC2. There's a lot of hype with the cloud, and there's a lot of reality with it too. In the future, organizations like UC4 are going to have to play in the cloud space really well, and we've been talking about that with them. 

FCIO: How hard was it to pitch this investment to those who hold the purse strings?

Richards: Ultimately I had to sell it to our budget review team. It's not like [pitching] a CRM system or something. It doesn't have a lot of glitz. Nobody wants to spend money on infrastructure, but if you can take care of some of the foundational stuff, you have more time for innovation and new products. 

The value that we've gotten out of the tool has far exceeded our initial ROI. We've about doubled the amount of production build cycles we can do in a year now.

We've reduced our production server farm deployments from about 5 to 8 hours to under an hour. The number of people who had to be involved have been reduced dramatically as well. It can now be done by a single person. 

The advice I would give is think broadly. CIOs need to think big.