Rob Aitken is a FusionAuth community member and CIO of the South Australian Tertiary Admissions Centre (SATAC). He chatted with us over email about how he and his team are using FusionAuth to meet their auth needs.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
Dan: Can you tell me a bit about SATAC? What is the organization’s mission?
Rob: SATAC is an admissions centre for higher education. Our mission is to aid and support students through providing a centralised admissions process for all higher education providers in South Australia and Northern Territory.
Dan: Tell me about your work as a CIO at SATAC.
Rob: My role at SATAC is to align our technology strategies and roadmaps to support and enable our organisation’s mission and broader business strategy.
In the last 18 months, we have invested in one of our key strategic projects, ‘Applicant Success’, which targets customer experience and modernising the applicant processes.
We are starting to see the benefits of this investment, with student admissions and feedback.
[After adopting FusionAuth, a new survey determined the system] customer experience rating was 92%, which has exceeded our expectations and measures of success.
Dan: How do you use FusionAuth? OAuth? User management? Social sign-on? Something else?
Rob: Our Applicant Success project reviewed the whole applicant process through a research process, including journey mapping.
One of the key applicant pain points was the user registration process. FusionAuth has significantly improved this process through a modern authentication process and the provision of social sign-ons.
We are receiving really positive feedback around the new user registration process which has been built around the FusionAuth product.
Dan: What social sign-on methods are your applicants using? Are there any that you wish FusionAuth supported that it doesn’t?
Rob: We went live with Google and Facebook which have both proven successful with customers. Apple and LinkedIn are in our plans, both of which you also support.
Beyond that, we are pretty comfortable, so no, the product absolutely meets our needs from that perspective.
Dan: What problems did we solve for you?
Rob: Per above, registration was a pain point for applicants which caused downstream issues logging on or accessing the application process.
Overall, the product is a great fit for our new application stack and is operating well for our customers.
Dan: How were you solving them before FusionAuth?
Rob: Applicants were needing to call or email our call centre. Registration and login problems were manually fixed by SATAC staff.
Dan: Why did you choose FusionAuth over the alternatives?
Rob: We analysed the different solution options, and we chose FusionAuth based on the following reasons:
- Alignment with current technical skills and ease of technical competency.
- Time to deliver a solution.
- Cost effectiveness for our use case.
Dan: How much time and money would you say FusionAuth has saved you?
Rob: While there have been time and cost savings, we measure the success of FusionAuth on the overall project customer experience improvements, which have been significant.
From a recent survey of applicants, our customer experience rating was 92%, which has exceeded our expectations and measures of success.
FusionAuth has significantly improved the [user registration] process through a modern authentication process and the provision of social sign-ons.
Dan: How do you run FusionAuth (kubernetes, standalone server, behind a proxy, etc)?
Rob: We run the managed hosted version of FusionAuth (through the FusionAuth Cloud). This has worked well for us and provides us with the assurance that the solution is managed, secure and current.
Dan: Any general feedback/areas to improve?
Rob: The team have enjoyed working with the product and are seeing the benefits. We are also very appreciative of the support team and their willingness to help answer questions and provide expert advice.
Overall, the product is a great fit for our new application stack and is operating well for our customers.
Dan: Thanks for your feedback!
We love sharing community stories. You can check out SATAC’s website if you’d like to learn more about them.
