I have spent a fair amount of time recently, ruminating on compliant provisioning and what comes after it. It is a fascinating mental exercise and if it remained as such, it would be useless. Yesterday, I got to see it in action.
I was at a customer, watching our integration with their provisioning system get installed and configured. It was, as all good software installs should be, quite boring. But what did captivate me was the business case and drivers for compliant provisioning. Though our customer has a mature provisioning system in production, they have yet to achieve fully automated provisioning. Why? Certainly not for lack of trying. Because their SAP environment is large, complex, and ever-changing, they cannot implement a comprehensive set of automated provisioning rules for fear of SoD creeping in.
They already rely of Approva BizRights to do “What If” analysis. It verifies on an ongoing basis that role definitions do not generate separation of duty problem as well as make sure accounts don’t contain any SoD problems as well. Currently, their outsourced help desk fields access requests. They gather up the roles being requests and use BizRights to perform What If analysis on the proposed account changes and then route the request on for provisioning.
Instead of an access request flowing to the help desk then into BizRights for analysis, they plan on automating the access request via their provisioning system. By using our “What If” analysis within the provisioning system they can cut out the help desk all together, eliminating that manual step. A handful of their SAP systems generate the vast majority of their ticket call volume. By implementing compliant provisioning, integrating BizRights with their provisioning tool, they are looking to cut that call volume down to 0 and save a bundle in the process.
A couple more of these kinds of deployments and compliant provisioning will be the norm in the provisioning market… and then I’ll be talking to you about what comes next.