When it comes to complex tasks or projects that involve multiple departments throughout an organization, the onboarding and offboarding of employees is often overlooked. Often this process is thought of as something Human Resources handles, but anyone involved in the hiring process will tell you that it’s a complex process that involves many different departments.
While both the onboarding and offboarding of employees might start with HR, it usually involves groups from at least IT and facilities as well. Often these three groups tend to work so independently that much of the process is managed in emails or through siloed, department-specific ticketing systems.
Any HR or IT manager who has faced this challenge knows that when onboarding new employees, there are many different workflows, and overseeing a cumbersome off-boarding process can entail some major security risks. This is why we recommend a single-platform approach with automation and integration.
Using Enterprise Integration and Automation to Simplify Onboarding/Offboarding
Because onboarding/offboarding is traditionally very manual, it’s often the most complex, time–consuming process for organizations. When you have enterprise integration and automation (iPaaS) with your IT (ITSM) or Enterprise Service Management (ESM), you can build out workflows that automate the processes – using data from multiple systems.
When a new employee joins a company, there are usually several things that need to happen. For example, an employee record needs to be created in the Active Directory or HR system and the payroll system; permissions need to be set for a variety of programs and software licensing needs to be assigned for things like Microsoft365 or Slack, the list goes on and on.
Offboarding is equally as daunting and can at times present critical security risks. By using iPaaS, you can set up a workflow that automatically removes all permissions when a person is deactivated within an HR system – removing the risk.
In addition to improving security and efficiencies, automating onboarding and offboarding can save organizations time.
Matthew Wright, technical support manager, said iPaaS has been a welcome addition at Western University of Health Sciences (WesternU).
“Things like onboarding and off-boarding users and updating permissions used to involve a lot of manual, tedious work,” Wright said. “These things happen on a regular basis, and they take away time that could be used more strategically to improve our customers’ IT experience. With iPaaS in place, we have been able to create internal automations that set us up well for the future.”
Pima County Creating Better Employee Experience with iPaaS
Pima County recently purchased TeamDynamix for ITSM and iPaaS – integration platform as a service. With iPaaS, the county is looking to integrate systems beyond IT to automate processes like onboarding and offboarding employees.
“We are starting small, hoping to use automation to take tickets and automatically deploy software to endpoints, to onboard and offboard users with Active Directory and distribution groups,” Mark Hayes, information technology leader, said.
When it comes to onboarding new hires, the county’s goal is to have new employees arrive on day one with everything they need to get to work, “You don’t need to waste so much time when it comes to onboarding,” Hayes said. “It really is such a sour experience for a new hire to come in, in this day and age, and sit around for three days waiting on their computer to show up. We need to get out of that mode and iPaaS is going to help us do that.”
In addition, using iPaaS to automate offboarding will save countless hours for a process that is normally very manual and heavily audited as Pima County is a government entity.
“As a government organization we get audited by the state every year and they want to know what these stale accounts are doing sitting here,” Hayes said. “Offboarding is currently a very manual process – having to review the list from HR of people who are no longer employed with us and manually revoking their privileges from all the different systems and software and disabling their accounts. There’s absolutely no reason for that to not be automated. iPaaS is going to help us a lot with this and save us time.”
Want to learn more about what you can do with an integration and automation tool like iPaaS? Check out our eBook: Enterprise Integration Playbook – Saving Time with iPaaS
This article was originally published in March 2018 and has been updated with new information.