* Courion offers a free tool to calculate the cost of manual provisioning
Lately, it seems I’ve spent a fair amount of time offering suggestions about ways to convince the people who hold the purse strings as to why it’s a good idea to implement some form of electronic provisioning system. We’ve offered studies on TCO and ROI. We’ve offered studies of security risk assessment. We’ve even shared cautionary tales about what happens when good provisioning and de-provisioning tools aren’t in place. But short of engaging high-priced consultants to come in and create a study (priced at more than you make in a year) examining the risks and benefits of provisioning in your organization, there’s little available to personalize the situation for your enterprise. But I have found one tool that could help.
Courion, which has been in the identity management business since before there was a term for it (it started in the mid-1990s working on managing x.500 name spaces) has made available for you to use at no charge a “User Provisioning Savings Calculator” (https://www.courion.com/products/acc/calculator.asp).
Plug in a few numbers about your employee base and it will spit out estimates of the cost of manually provisioning their accounts. In addition, it will as quantify the lost productivity that inevitably ensues from a manual provisioning system as new employees “tread water” waiting for all the tools and access they need to do their job effectively.
It’s not rocket science. Given the formulae you could work it out on paper for yourself. But it’s been proven over and over again that people give more weight to numbers and facts reported by a (perceived) neutral outsider than to those from the people who work for them.
In talking to Courion CEO Chris Zannetos and marketing Vice President Tom Rose about the company’s savings calculator and identity management offerings, I found that the company practices a policy that I’ve long been preaching about how to get provisioning projects going in the enterprise. I’m not sure that Zannetos actively set out to do it this way, just that it inevitably followed on from the way the company developed. I’ll go into the idea in-depth next issue, for now just think of the term “baby steps”. See you next time.
