User provisioning from the HR system without extra licensing charges
It’s a new year. It’s also a year in which existing contracts with IT suppliers will expire, and organisations need to consider whether their current systems are still appropriate to their aspirations, or whether a different system is needed.
In the HR systems market, it’s very usual to sign multi-year contracts. Organisations face a significant choice when these contracts lapse. Because, unlike a few years ago, organisations can now choose between a traditional on-premises package and a cloud version. We are certainly well aware of the advantages and disadvantages of each method by now, but what is still not always taken into consideration is the use of information from the HR package to manage identities in the network.
User management impact
When an HR suite is used on-premise it’s easy for the acclaimed system administrators to retrieve information from the HR system and to deploy it for user management. Based on this information, a user account is created with the associated rights to folders and applications. Unfortunately things are not that simple when opting for a hosted environment. When the HR system is in the cloud, organisations are dependent on the HR supplier to deliver this type of information, for example using a reporting module that needs to be built. The disadvantage of this is that the report then has to be transcribed, often manually, to create user accounts.
Auto user provisioning
To not be dependent on an HR supplier or generated reports, it’s also possible to deploy an auto provisioning solution. This will use certified connectors with both on-premises and cloud versions of various HR suites. For user management, utilising such a connector means it makes no difference which HR suite is deployed or whether it is on-premises or in the cloud.
Connecting HR systems
With the help of the connector, the software automatically retrieves the required information from the HR suite, such as name and address details, job position, cost center and responsible manager, and it then creates a user account for a new staff-member automatically. This means the employee is productive immediately and the system administrator is relieved of this type of task. And because there are connectors for almost all HR packages, such as SAP and PeopleSoft, this process simply continues to operate if a new HR provider is chosen.
One of the organisations that experience the benefit of user provisioning is National Geographic. Because of the hundreds of contractors that Nat Geo employs, the IT department had to deal with having a high turnover rate for accounts. Very often they were provisioning 10 new accounts and de-provisioning another five every day. This process was done manually and was extremely time consuming and inefficient. For a new employee to correctly be provisioned, the hiring manager had to get the correct paper form, fill it out and give it to the helpdesk with a signature, and then as many as four different admins would go about provisioning the attributes of the account. This process would often take up to a day and would have to be handled by many employees along the way.
National Geographic is able to connect their PeopleSoft HR system to Active Directory with a solution known as UMRA. It is set up to automatically read new data twice a day and automatically synchronise it to AD and Google. Now, when someone enters a new personnel request UMRA automatically creates a new Google Apps account, AD account, share drive, personal drive and profile. UMRA also assists with automatically de-provisioning accounts. Once an employee account is disabled in PeopleSoft, UMRA automatically disables their AD and Google accounts to ensure that the employee no longer has access.
