Last Fall, LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner spoke about the global workforce entering what he calls a “talent economy age” during the
Web 2.0 conference. Several weeks ago, Google also announced it intends to
hire 6,000 new employees in 2011 to further drive development and innovation. Moreover, Bill Cheney, chief economist for Manulife Asset Management forecast
2.5 million to 3 million new jobs this year.
So what does this expected surge in hiring and employment mean for IT departments worldwide?
It means they will need to make sure they are prepared to get employees on boarded and ramped up quickly so that organizations can boost productivity as a result. Provisioning new employees – safely and securely so as to protect the integrity of critical systems and data – will be a priority.
Once on-boarded, IT needs to manage the identities and access of these new employees. So user accounts should be created with privileges granted to only the applications and services they need to do their jobs.
How can this be done quickly, given that a large number of new workers are expected to come on board? Most administrators know that manual provisioning is a time-consuming, tedious task.
Automating the user provisioning process will help administrators stay sane while ensuring employees are on-boarded quickly and securely. Process automation enables provisioning requests to be automatically triggered by updates in Human Resource applications or in a help desk ticketing system. There a list of pros for automated user provisioning, as it enables IT to:
- Reduce administrative errors
- Improve Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for user access
- Automate account management
- Segregate populations of users
- Automate reporting and audit of user accounts
- Automate work flow approvals
- Reduce risk of unauthorized access
- Have consistent access policies and centralized control
By automating user provisioning in preparation for today’s talent economy and in expectation of new hires this year, companies can eliminate time spent waiting for IT resources to onboard new employees and more quickly enable them to contribute to the business.
