Streamlining Onboarding and Offboarding Processes with Ivanti Identity Director

Today’s society requires a provincial government that carefully examines its various roles, and that gives people, municipalities, civil-society organisations and businesses confidence in the Groningen Provincial Council. The council forms the administrative link between the national government and the municipalities. The 1,200 employees do their best every day to ensure that policies are implemented as smoothly as possible in the various policy areas: from healthcare to economy, from art and culture to spatial planning. This requires an organisation that functions smoothly. Until recently, the onboarding, changes, and offboarding of employees went through an outdated, self-developed solution that could no longer support the processes. Consequently, the Province of Groningen decided to call in the assistance of consultancy partner IT-Value to provide an efficient and effective solution.

The problem

In the old solution, known as "Data Warehouse," almost everything had to be tuned manually, which meant the onboarding and offboarding of employees took a lot of time. “We had to set up an account, create a mailbox, set a password, and then link this to Active Directory, where the phone number and room number had to be entered,” says Karim Van Uggelen, technical project manager at the Province of Groningen. “Applications were delivered manually. In addition, the maintenance of the system became too complex and time-consuming: it was all custom-made and outdated. This prompted us to look for a system that could support the onboarding, changes, and offboarding process of employees in an automated manner.”

Ivanti solutions integrate easily with each other

The province was already using a number of Ivanti solutions, including Automation, employed to build and roll out new “golden” images for Citrix, and also the Ivanti workspace solution, used for setting up and managing user profiles and linking additional mailboxes. Van Uggelen says, “Ivanti significantly simplifies user management. Application data that users normally store on their local hard disc is now on a network drive. This makes it easier to retrieve the data in case of errors and malfunctions.”

He continues, “We use Ivanti Automation, among other things, to stop and start applications and to transfer data to other systems. The monthly Windows updates are implemented with Citrix and Ivanti Automation. Our experience with Ivanti and its solutions has been good, so the decision to consider Ivanti Identity Director was obvious. Other Identity and Access Management (IAM) solutions were also examined, but Ivanti Identity Director was chosen because the solution is easy to integrate with the other Ivanti solutions. The software can be managed independently without customization and offers plenty of possibilities for expansion in the future.”

The implementation of Ivanti Identity Director

The Province purchased Ivanti Identity Director to support all 1,200 employees. A complete Development, Testing, and Acceptance environment has also been set up based on IT policy. Van Uggelen is pleased with the cooperation of its implementation partner, IT-Value: “It is a nice company that has more than enough knowledge at both the social and technical level. They have helped us from A to Z with the choice and implementation of Ivanti Identity Director.”Van Uggelen adds, “In the exploratory phase they informed us about the possibilities of Ivanti Identity Director. At the start of the project, they worked out the functional and technical design with the project stakeholders. This is an important basis for the further expansion of this process. During the implementation, the cooperation was close. Our managers were kept informed throughout the work, which enabled them to learn more about the product at the same time.”

Ivanti Identity Director is fed from the personnel administration system: here the personal and function data is entered and used by Ivanti Identity Director for the automatic creation of mailboxes and passwords. “That was a big challenge, because we have to deal with a lot of exceptions, from group employees who are not employed by us, but have a mailbox, to retired employees who must remain in the HR system but don’t need an account,” says Van Uggelen. “The system must provide for all of this. We had to bring it all together. Fortunately, thanks to the flexibility of Ivanti and IT-Value, that went smoothly, and it is now running as it should.”

Ivanti Identity Director (now User Workspace Manager) simplifies and optimises processes

The creation of new users and their associated accounts is now automatic, but that is only the first step in taking advantage of the possibilities of Ivanti Identity Director. Says Van Uggelen, “At the moment, we only use Ivanti Identity Director for staff onboarding and offboarding. It’s used to create and link the account, the mailbox, and the password. But, in the near future, we are going to extend that to access security with role-based rights. Then people will gain access to the right applications and data automatically, based on their role and location. For example, when someone joins another department or changes roles, the access rights will be automatically adjusted accordingly. And we will no longer need to worry about security and compliance when someone leaves service since the access rights are automatically revoked.”

In addition, Ivanti Identity Director provides significant time savings for the helpdesk. Previously, all changes were checked manually; it’s now fully automatic. “In the unlikely event that something goes wrong, we will be notified by email,” says Van Uggelen. “Also, the process has become more transparent and we can now see much better where things go wrong and optimise processes. For example, an exit date must be filled in, otherwise the system will supplement this with the employee pension date. This helps ensure extra security.”

The process of onboarding new employees is now followed automatically twice a day, instead of once as before. This has given the Province more flexibility to ensure that employees can get to work more quickly.

Concludes Van Uggelen, "With all the time savings and the gains in efficiency, we can focus more on serving our end users, instead of being busy keeping the system running. I expect that this will only become more so in the future.”

_{Note: A customer’s results are specific to its total environment/experience, of which Ivanti is a part. Individual results may vary based on each customer’s unique environment.}