User Account Management/Employee Terminations

A 15,000 employee energy company had roughly eight full-time staff dedicated to user account management. Between growth and attrition, this customer hired approximately 1,500 new employees annually. Each new employee required a user account in the corporate domain, a mailbox configured and added to appropriate e-mail groups, public and private folders configured on the network drive to store files, and a login and password for accessing the payroll tracking system, vacation tracking system, and company intranet. Each new employee would also typically need two or more additional accounts to be created, depending on the employee’s role and department. Furthermore, when an employee left the company, all of those accounts would need to be deleted and verified.

Although a few of the systems had automated utilities for account creation/maintenance, orchestrating the process as a whole for each employee involved many manual steps. On average, each termination or new hire consumed ten staff hours and took three to four days to complete.

The company decided to invest in Optinuity’s technology to automate its processes. The hiring/HR manager used a Web interface to easily create and manage an Autonomic Policy for account management.

Results:

• Automated the vast majority of user account management activities
• Reduced dedicated staff from eight to two people
• Reduced new employee account set-up from three or four days to three hours, allowing new hires to become productive faster