Bring Sanity to Your Provisioning/App Assignment Process

As far as buzzwords go, workflow automation is up there as one of the best when it comes trying to say a lot without helping people actually understand what it really means to them, their business and their job. Simply stated, workflow automation is about automating everyday tasks and business processes within an organization. It can mean anything from improving efficiency to reducing costs. It can help automate customer service, expense reporting and many administrative tasks that are currently manual processes. Workflow automation can be used to automate any process that involves human interaction.But to understand really how that impacts the IT industry, we have to understand the inherent challenges that SaaS brings to IT departments from a workload perspective. These challenges include increased complexity and higher costs via the volume and dispersed management of apps, as well as longer audit cycles. IT departments must now support a wider variety of applications and business processes while ensuring security and compliance.

In the days of on premises software implementation, technical hurdles were high, even for IT departments because they had to deal with everything from legacy systems to outdated hardware. Today, cloud-based solutions can make this process much easier. Enterprise businesses like Adobe, Salesforce, and Microsoft have made it possible for companies to implement new platforms quickly and easily. Cloud-based solutions are the norm now because they allow businesses to access their applications remotely without having to worry about updating hardware or installing updates.In many ways, the world today has gotten easier with SaaS. There are some things though that have become more complex. For example, it is becoming more difficult to manage user permissions. This has a significant impact for onboarding and offboarding of employees regardless if your are an enterprise business or not. Also, it's become more difficult to centrally manage the full breadth of software an organization uses. Because any employee with a credit card can typically start a software subscription, licensing across an organization has be come increasingly decentralized and harder to manage. That can create significant workflow and security problems.

Core to many IT teams (25% or more of IT tickets ) is managing individual user access to applications and systems. While often involving mundane tasks, provisioning processes can vary greatly depending on the type of applications you have. Often it’s the departmental owner of a SaaS solution that purchases licenses, approves access and provisions the license with a set of permissions in smaller companies. As companies grow, IT teams may centralize that function or work with individual teams in a hybrid manner, routing requests to hiring managers for approval while handling licensing and account setup. In any case, the provisioning process should include steps to ensure secure authentication methods are used and least privilege access is granted.

Because of that IT overhead, ticketing systems are often implemented to manage requests. It's not uncommon for organizations to have hundreds of tickets open at any given time. Most organizations will implement a ticketing system to handle this volume of requests. However, there are other types of ticketing systems used by businesses that aren't focused on managing large volumes of requests. These include issue tracking systems, project management systems, and knowledge management systems. If not purposely built for IT tickets, these systems can have significant setup time involved, with constant tweaking to address organizational business rules.

There are also frameworks for implementing service management. ITIL, or the Information Technology Infrastructure Library establishes detailed practices for many IT activities. Different ticket types include incident response, change request, configuration management, problem management, asset management, and capacity planning. Each type has its own set of processes and procedures, which often involve a custom workflow. For example, an incident response process may include a series of tasks such as documenting the event, analyzing the issue, determining root cause, reporting the findings, and taking action using pre-defined business rules across business systems.

Workflow automation is an automated process that allows you to connect actions together into a chain. You can create a process by connecting tasks like sending emails or creating a new account. Then you can automate the process by scheduling them to run at certain times. For example, if you want to send an email every morning at 9 AM, you could schedule the task to start running at 9 AM every day. If something goes wrong during the execution of the task, it will automatically stop without any human intervention. This type of automation helps businesses scale quickly and efficiently. In the case of IT departments, workflow automation helps team manage their processes. Their goal is to make sure that everything happens in the right order and that they don't have to waste time dealing with manual tasks. When an employee needs to perform a particular action, like getting access to a new software solution, they simply click a button or enter a command. Often this is connected to a form that captures request details. The system takes over and does the rest in an ideal state. This often involves routing communication to several internal employees, getting responses and resolving the request. In practice, connecting internal teams and applications can be a major undertaking and still have manual steps involved, even with enterprise level software.

An example of workflow automation for a software provisioning request might include notification by the human resources team of a new employee joining the sales department via project management software. This software often captures the request via a form, which is the trigger for the workflow process to begin. The request is then routed to an IT manager, who inquires of the hiring manager what software and permissions within that software should be provided. The IT manager then often uses pre-determined permission groups for the department to automate the provisioning via an identity access management (IAM) tool with adjustments per the hiring manager's input. The ticket is then closed with notifications and often setup instructions to involved parties that access has been granted. The extent of the digital workflow is often hidden to the source team, in this case, human resources. As you can see, this process involves several systems and people, and while part of this may be robotic process automation, there are still some gaps that are handled manually. Whether it's an efficient workflow that helps improve operations is always up for review.

For IT, workflow automation can has a significant impact, especially when more of those manual bits can be automated. Any workflow automation process has the potential to reduce costs and improve efficiency by allowing teams to focus on higher-value activities instead of repetitive tasks. This is why organizations like Amazon, Google, and Salesforce invest heavily in this type of technology.

Further benefits of using IT workflow automation software that is integrated with your systems include improving new hire productivity and shortening their ramp up time, which helps them provide faster value to the organization. IT teams can also benefit by reducing time spent on lower level tasks like provisioning, which can eat up over 25% of a team's time in SaaS intensive work environments. Applied to de-provisioning or offboarding of employees, workflow automation logic can also reduce risk and potentially avoid lost revenue related to security breaches by addressing privileged access issues.

Every department in modern mid- to enterprise-size businesses can benefit from workflow automation. Here are some examples of workflow automation: Sales departments might use automated workflows to better capture contact information for prospects and communicate with them. A marketing team may use automated workflows to route leads more effectively across several technology platforms to the right team members. For IT, it can dramatically improve the provisioning of SaaS solutions, help address security issues related to privileged access (to company systems and customer data), and also help with access reviews that are part of compliance processes. More advanced workflows could might include vendor reviews or vendor risk assessments. There are so many types of workflow automation in which rule-based logic can eliminate manual workflows prone to human errors and put in place significant process improvements that help an organization thrive.