World of Workato 2025 | Darren Owsley, Gonzaga University

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Darren Owsley

Deputy Chief Information Officer

Gonzaga University

play_circle_outline Darren shares Gonzaga's transition from Boomi to Workato for integrations.

play_circle_outline Agentic AI's potential in higher education: improving student experience and enrollment.

play_circle_outline The role of students in building AI agents for more relevant experiences.

play_circle_outline Importance of clean data and security governance in building AI applications.

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Darren Owsley, Gonzaga University

Darren Owsley

Deputy Chief Information Officer Gonzaga University

In this World of Workato (WOW) interview, Darren Owsley, CIO of Gonzaga University, joins theCUBE’s Savannah Peterson and Rob Strechay to share how higher education is leveraging Workato to move beyond integration into orchestration and agentic AI. Owsley reflects on Gonzaga’s transition from Boomi to Workato, highlighting how his team converted 120 integrations in just two months while implementing Salesforce. He outlines how Workato’s platform enabled democratized innovation across faculty, staff, and even students, reducing time spent coding and empowering... Read more

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What integration platform did Gonzaga choose initially, and what prompted them to switch to another platform after five years? add

What impact does working with Workato have on the experience of prospective students, existing students, and faculty at Gonzaga? add

What has been the evolution of the relationship with Workato and how is it currently being utilized? add

What challenges does Gonzaga University face regarding application management and data security? add

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Darren Owsley, Gonzaga University

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Savannah Peterson

>> Good afternoon Workato fans and welcome back to day two of our two days of live coverage here at World of Workato. My name is Savannah Peterson. Very excited to be bringing you a power packed afternoon here with my favorite Rob Strechay. Rob, have you figured out what you want your personal genie to do yet?

Rob Strechay

>> No, I haven't. I'm going to keep thinking about it.

Savannah Peterson

>> All right. You have until the end of the day.

Rob Strechay

>> I will-

Savannah Peterson

>> Because I will bring it back.

Rob Strechay

>> I think at the end of the close, we'll have to go through that. But I will have something good.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yes, you will have something good. Speaking of something good, I am very excited to welcome our next guest to the show. Darren, thank you so much for coming to hang out with us.

Darren Owsley

>> Absolutely. Thanks for having me.

Savannah Peterson

>> This is going to be awesome. We're going to have a little bit of a juicy conversation.

Darren Owsley

>> I hope so.

Savannah Peterson

>> Which is going to be fantastic. Tell me a little bit about first your experience with Workato and the implementation that you've done recently, and then we'll go back a little more historically as time goes on.

Darren Owsley

>> Yeah. So for us at Gonzaga, we needed an iPaaS solution back in 2018, we were implementing Salesforce, we ended up selecting Boomi at the time. And the reason we selected Dell Boomi was master data management. The two integration platform and the master data management came together in a package. Ironically though, the technical team chose Workato as the integration platform. We ended up going with Boomi at the time.

Savannah Peterson

>> Which is interesting. Yeah.

Darren Owsley

>> Interesting. Yeah. So we spent five years with Boomi. We quickly realized though that we weren't able to get integrations done quick enough and we needed to pivot. We had about two months in between Salesforce go-lives and we said, "Hey, let's take a look at other platforms, see what's out there." And it took two months, we selected Workato and implemented Salesforce and converted 120 integrations.

Savannah Peterson

>> Wow. So what's been the biggest positive change since you did that?

Darren Owsley

>> Yeah, I think for the team itself, the Workato partnership has been a lot of fun. And I think with fun comes just good work.

Savannah Peterson

>> They are great people. The culture is real.

Darren Owsley

>> It is. You look around here today and it changes every year, it's getting better and better. Just an amazing company overall. I think my team originally thought, man, we're crazy for doing this. We have two months. We're going into a Salesforce implementation. We have all these integrations to get through. They did a wonderful job. We made it, our Workato partners were there every step of the way, and just an amazing experience. Yeah, fun too.

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah.

Savannah Peterson

>> I love that.

Rob Strechay

>> And talk a little bit about how you've seen it evolve because we weren't here last year and I know we were somewhere else. But there's so much energy and the people that are here and the customers that are here. I mean, again, we go to a lot of these and I don't say it lightly, but-

Savannah Peterson

>> Seriously....

Rob Strechay

>> it's a very positive vibe and very positive interactions with all the other customers.

Darren Owsley

>> Absolutely. So when you think about last year's WOW, and we were down in San Mateo Fairgrounds, like barnyard style, really wonderful setting. But this year is big, we're here at the Cosmo.

Savannah Peterson

>> And that's very glam, it's very chic.

Darren Owsley

>> Glamorous, yeah.

Savannah Peterson

>> From the fairgrounds to the Cosmo, let's go.

Darren Owsley

>> And it fits Workato, right? This whole Cosmo. And the beautiful thing here today is look at all these people. It feels like there's three times as many people as there was last year. And the excitement is high. From orchestration to agentic AI, a lot of new things being rolled out from the Workato team. That's really exciting.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah, absolutely. So let's talk about this from the other side of the experience. So you've got lots of students, both existing, perspective, a lot of different people accessing your systems, trying to learn information. Working with Workato, how does that enhance the experience for those prospective students and existing students on the other side or even faculty?

Darren Owsley

>> So our goal right now with the prospective students is high ed is in an enrollment cliff right now. We're going to see the decline on the applicants coming into higher ed. And right now what we're gearing up to do is use this agentic AI to offset and really help us. We may see position cuts, so we're going to have to do more with less and really focus on an experience for Gonzaga and what that experience looks like. Think of an org chart of agentic, these agents, we have the CEO telling all these agents what to do. And having that experience from being a recruit to an applicant, to a student, to alumni or donor, same experience for every single one of them at any stage of where they're at in the Gonzaga community.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah. No, I can see that. I was just thinking about what our alumni network does. And I swear they find me every Christmas somehow, even if I've moved, and send me a little Christmas card. And it's always really lovely.

Darren Owsley

>> Yeah. Absolutely.

Savannah Peterson

>> And I'm like, "Wow, about all that money I spent."

Rob Strechay

>> Well, yeah. Trust me, there's a whole different reason why they come after you, but that's-

Savannah Peterson

>> Oh, no. I still like seeing a husky on the postcard.

Rob Strechay

>> That's not the money you spent before. But I think what's interesting is you've started with the integration, but you've moved beyond that. Talk about how your relationship with Workato and what you're using them for now because you've gone down that genie route.

Darren Owsley

>> Yeah, again, going back to nearly three years ago, we started on that integration orchestration side of the house.

Savannah Peterson

>> 120 integrations is no small feat either.

Darren Owsley

>> No. And we were able to do that in a matter of nine months or less, seven months.

Savannah Peterson

>> That's pretty good.

Darren Owsley

>> While we implemented Salesforce. So I think that speaks a lot about the platform itself. But our journey started with the integration side of the house. And where we're at now today, we spend less time building, we spend more time QAing, and now we're shifting our focus to really that agentic side of the house. It's interesting, last year was a lot of focus on orchestration here at WOW. This year it's all agentic. And what can these agents do for you?

Savannah Peterson

>> What do you hope that these agents do for you over the course of the next year?

Darren Owsley

>> I think for us, again, it's experience for Gonzaga. We're a special place. We're highly personal. And I think bringing that experience of what these agents can do. Again, going back to really recruits, how can we recruit students that fit our Gonzaga model? How can we interact with them and get them to see the benefits of coming to Gonzaga?

Savannah Peterson

>> What are the conversations like on campus with the students about AI right now?

Darren Owsley

>> I mean being students and young, the students I think gravitate towards AI just naturally. I think what we're going to see is we're going to see more of that. We have some individuals that are going to be all in and we know that there's going to be individuals that are saying, "No AI."

Rob Strechay

>> Where did you go first with the genie that you said you've already rolled out? What is that helping you do or what is the KPIs?

Darren Owsley

>> Yeah. So the first genie we rolled out was the IT Genie. And the reason we went there and started with the IT Genie is we wanted to eat our own dog food. We wanted to not only eat our own dog food and roll out the IT Genie for ourselves, but it gave our team the experience there. We were able to learn, we brought together a very diverse team in IT to put this genie together. So we had two students, we have security analysts, we have business analysts. So not the typical architects, developers that you typically think of coming together to build these agents. Really diverse team. And the people that do the most work on it, the employees, are not the developers. So it's been really awesome to watch this team work together, figure this genie out and roll it out to our community.

Savannah Peterson

>> How did you know to approach it that way? Because I love that. I love that you involved every end of the spectrum. How do you build a culture around this?

Darren Owsley

>> Yeah. So we're moving to more of an agile framework at Gonzaga IT. And right now where we're at is we're trying to build teams that are not the same teams we've used day in and day for these big projects or small projects. And on this one we just said, "Hey, let's think of individuals, employees that we normally wouldn't have on this project and let's bring them in." And it's worked out really well.

Savannah Peterson

>> I believe it. And that's one of the things we've heard a lot from everybody at Workato is it's really about bringing everyone into the fold. You hear every company and every hyperscaler right now talk about democratizing AI. It doesn't happen if you don't bring the right people into the room to innovate.

Darren Owsley

>> Well, I think that going back to the Workato platform itself and one of the reasons why we purchased Workato was we don't want it just to be an IT tool. We want our students utilizing it, we want our faculty, our staff, we want all the departments on campus. And I think that's really the beauty of Workato is it's not a tech-heavy platform. And on the other side, you're not losing features, you're not losing the features from other iPaaS solutions. So you get feature-rich and we have end users that are able to use it.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah. Which is pretty-

Rob Strechay

>> And... Oh, sorry.

Savannah Peterson

>> No, please. We're both excited.

Rob Strechay

>> I know.

Savannah Peterson

>> I like it.

Rob Strechay

>> I want to circle back a little bit on the integrations and the MDM side of the house. And when you talk about 120 different integrations. That was more than just Salesforce. I mean it seems like you have a very diverse infrastructure that you have to bring together. And help us understand because I think part of the keys to AI is data and making sure it's the right data, the right governance. And higher ed in particular, you have a lot of different, I guess you could say, things that you have to solve for because you have faculty, you have staff, you have students. And your security and governance has to be at the heart of what you do.

Darren Owsley

>> Yeah. So even though we're a pretty small university, we centrally support about 300 applications on campus. So our portfolio is big.

Rob Strechay

>> Wow.

Savannah Peterson

>> Wow.

Darren Owsley

>> Now we saw a huge sprawl during COVID, just like everybody else did. But in higher ed, I think higher ed hangs on to software for a long time. So that's a challenge for us. But when you brought up data, and I spoke about this yesterday in one of the sessions, data is the key to this and if your data's not clean, you're going to struggle. So as you're going into building these agents out, think about your data and security. Security is top of the mind for us at Gonzaga. And security plays a big role in this. And what we've learned through this first agentic rollout is our security analysts saw things and other individuals didn't. Which was really beneficial for the project.

Savannah Peterson

>> I think that's interesting. You're right about academia and new software adoption. There tends to be a lot of legacy hanging out in there. You're fighting a good noble fight right now.

Darren Owsley

>> Absolutely.

Savannah Peterson

>> I can see that. So because we can and because the opportunity has presented itself, what would you tell someone who is currently using Boomi and evaluating Workato?

Darren Owsley

>> Sign tomorrow. And for Boomi, Boomi did the job we needed it to, but we outgrew Boomi. And so as a product, there was nothing wrong with Boomi. We needed to move faster. We need to move faster with less resources. And again, back to our story of what we were looking to do, we wanted this tool to be able to be utilized by students, faculty and staff sitting outside IT. And that's really why we gravitated towards Workato with the first round back in 2017, '18 is that was our vision then. So Boomi did its job, but what I would tell people today is don't hesitate, make the transition. Again, you'll be spending less time coding, more time doing QA and other fun things like the agentic work that we're doing today,

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah. And you'll get to involve more people in that process and bringing that creativity like you talked about.

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah, I mean it seems it became a force multiplier for you because you were talking about it. And headcount, even though you're at a university, even finding people would still be tough even if you were trying to. With the IT Genie, what problems or what cases is it solving for you? Is it for faculty and staff? Is it for the actual students? Is it for all the above? Or is it for you guys to actually get, like they were showing, the licensing portion of the IT Genie? Which I thought was awesome. I'm just finding redundant and giving that type of information back. What kind of use case are you solving?

Darren Owsley

>> Yeah, for our first use case, it was specifically for our ITSM, for ticketing. What were our biggest issues that we're seeing from IT ticketing? What's coming in the most? Was it password resets? Is it account requests? So we had a very small scope going into our initial implementation for our IT Genie. And quickly what we found out is everybody was so excited, our scope went like this, it just bursted. We had to swing back around and say, "Hey you guys, we need to keep to our scope and really focus on what we were set out to do here." So the first implementation is really focused on our ITSM tool. How can we get people interacting with the genie to either ask it an IT question that it's able to resolve or submit a ticket on their behalf?

Savannah Peterson

>> Wow, that's pretty cool. All right. Speaking of genies, I'm going to ask you a personal question.

Darren Owsley

>> Okay.

Savannah Peterson

>> If you could wave a magic wand and have a personal genie do something for you, what would your genie do?

Darren Owsley

>> Today if I had to pick any, I'd probably pick an email genie to summarize my email. We get hundreds of spam emails a day.

Savannah Peterson

>> Oh my gosh, I bet. Especially in your role.

Darren Owsley

>> So it'd be nice to have a genie. And I think it'd be really quick to build too. So having it summarize your entire inbox, tell you what to do, tell you when to do it, when you need to do it.

Savannah Peterson

>> And to get rid of all that spam so you don't even see it.

Darren Owsley

>> Absolutely. Yeah.

Savannah Peterson

>> And do it accurately and not accidentally filter out your friend who email you from their kitschy little email or whatever. It's not always the email address that's gnarly, it's the stuff inside it.

Darren Owsley

>> Yeah. Absolutely. Speaking about genies and agents, I think our focus is going to be really on the students and student success at Gonzaga. How can we help students where they're at in their journey? And I think this agentic, these agents, are going to help us do that.

Savannah Peterson

>> Dig in there a little bit. I'm sure the Workato people are listening to this. What sort of genies do you think students would benefit from most?

Darren Owsley

>> Yeah, I think one that stands out in my mind is the student wellness. We hear the population of students these days are suffering from depression and in big percentages. So from that student success and wellness, having an agent be able to say, "Hey, maybe you're slipping here or slipping there and we can help you out and here's some recommendations." That would be hugely beneficial for us.

Savannah Peterson

>> I really like that actually. Because I mean mental health is such an important thing, particularly when you're young and don't have the same perspective that we get as we get a little bit older. And there's been a lot of people actually using many forms of GPTs and AIs for that emotional support. Now that's not what it's designed for, which makes it a little dicier and a little weirder. And we've already seen some dark things that come out of that. But I love that. It's like your little buddy, your little hype person who's going to check in on you and make sure you went for your walk outside today and don't get too stressed about finals or whatever that is.

Darren Owsley

>> Absolutely. Did you go to class?

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah.

Darren Owsley

>> How are your grades doing? Do you need to study? Do you need me to create a practice quiz for you?

Rob Strechay

>> Right.

Darren Owsley

>> Just holistically help that student go through this four-year journey and help find themselves and educate them at the same time.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah, I think customized learning is going to be so cool. And that genie could know what you like outside of school too. So it could be like, given that you're the Zags, give me a basketball themed or basketball style quiz about this, or make it interactive and gamify it for me. I think there's going to be just so much potential. All right. Last question for you, Darren. Because you are a bit of a Workato poster boy and I know they love using you for a lot of positive things that they do.

Rob Strechay

>> You're literally on the poster outside here.

Darren Owsley

>> Humbling and embarrassing at the same time.

Rob Strechay

>> I mean, it's cool though.

Darren Owsley

>> It is.

Rob Strechay

>> I hope you took a great photo with it because it definitely is worthy. Definitely have to do that. What do you hope to be able to say when we're sitting down on this news desk next year that you can't yet say today?

Darren Owsley

>> I hope when we come back here next year, we have multiple agents laid out for the community. And we talk internally about our agent org chart, organization chart. We talk about is IT going to be the HR of agents? And I think giving us a year, we're going to be back here next year, we're going to have multiple agents rolled out across campus. We're going to have agents specifically targeting recruitment for Gonzaga, student success. You name it, we're going to do it.

Savannah Peterson

>> I love that. And my challenge to you, I hope you bring a student who helped build these genies as well and we can talk about that.

Darren Owsley

>> I'll tell you what, we'll make you a deal. We'll have the students that build genies come with us next year.

Rob Strechay

>> Awesome.

Savannah Peterson

>> Love it. Love to hear it, Darren. That's going to be awesome. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Darren Owsley

>> Absolutely. Thank you guys.

Savannah Peterson

>> And thank you, Rob. Always a blast. And thank all of you for tuning in to our fantastic two days of live coverage here in fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada, at World of Workato. My name is Savannah Peterson. You're watching theCUBE, the leading source for enterprise tech news.