Be Prepared: Laying the Groundwork for Provisioning

Computerworld - It took the problems caused by a single sign-on initiative to show Baptist Healthcare System Inc. the error of its provisioning ways. User accounts and passwords were different for each application, and there was no way to get control of orphaned user accounts. So the company changed its focus to management of these accounts through a provisioning tool, Control-SA from Houston-based BMC Software Inc.

Although integration was difficult, process changes were the hardest part of the two-year project that now provisions users to the organization's five key platforms, says Scott Hublar, client/server infrastructure analyst at the Louisville, Ky.-based chain of hospitals and managed care facilities.

"The political implications of changing administrative roles by far exceeded any type of technical problems we've run into," he says. "The hospital's field staff were the ones creating new accounts for new employees, and now we're telling them you don't have to do that anymore."

Political problems aren't the only things IT managers should consider when preparing their environments for provisioning, say project veterans. There's also workflow and process evaluations and other groundwork that must be laid before launching any new technologies.

Craig Haught, managing director of enterprise network solutions at Applied Materials Inc. in Santa Clara, Calif., started his provisioning project by pulling together the 25 administrators who manually granted user access to their applications. By putting their heads together, they created a conceptual model of what they wanted their provisioning product to do.

Based on that model, Haught settled on Access360 in Irvine, Calif. He narrowed down the project team to two internal employees and contracted three Access360 consultants to help steer and code the project.

Like at Baptist Healthcare, the tedium of data cleansing had to be done manually. So Applied's team developed a consistent naming structure and removed orphaned accounts from legacy applications. It was a pain, Haught says, but "clean data makes or breaks any automation project."

Change management took precedence throughout the project, Haught says. "We were able to do most of this work at the database and directory levels, making it fairly transparent to the general user population," he explains.

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