Reducing Organizational Costs by Eliminating Costly Mistakes

One of the major topics constantly on the minds of organizational leaders is, “How can I reduce costs?” Many times this is in terms of direct costs, such as employees and materials, as managers tend to look at employees’ salaries, materials, etc., used in day-to-day activities.

Frequently overlooked is the amount of time and money that goes into other aspects of running the business that cannot be physically seen. These include such things as the management of accounts, passwords, applications and other solutions. While not at first noticeable, these costs can add up, and there are ways in which expenditures can easily be reduced. If management and leaders sit down and actually add up how much it is costing them to manage employee accounts and passwords, the cost can be astonishing. Not only is the waste physical dollars, but can also be hours spent on processes that can be made more efficient.

The following are just a few of the common ways that an organization may be wasting money, as well as the actions that can be taken to easily reduce these cost wastes.

Account and Access Management Costs

Account and access management is a task that may be costing an organization more money than previously thought. In many cases, multiple staff members focus solely on provisioning, making changes and de-provisioning accounts throughout the year. Often, this is because these tasks are performed manually for each employee’s account, and while it is not difficult, they are extremely time-consuming tasks.

Frequently if there are a large number of employees beginning employment at a company, provisioning accounts in all the correct systems and applications for each employees can take hours. Then there is the issue of temporary or contract employees. Organizations who have employees who are only there for a short amount of time, and have frequent movement, spend much time provisioning, changing and de-provisioning these accounts. They need to ensure that these temporary employees have the access they need to perform their jobs while they are there, but then also that they are promptly disabled once they are no longer working for the company.

If there are full-time employees handling these account management actions, chances are they are highly experienced and trained and high-earning IT employees handing these task. Essentially, organizations are paying technical employees to perform these simple tasks.

In addition to the expenses of manual account management, access management may be costing organizations more money than is necessary. Between the provisioning, de-provisioning and movement of accounts, one item that tends to get overlooked is exactly who has access to what, who actually needs access to certain systems and applications and how many accounts are left active that need not to be. So, for example, companies may be paying for more license costs for an expensive application than are actually needed. Or even worse, they may be paying for accounts for people who no longer even work for the organization. These are all costs that might look minimal but when added up, are costing companies a substantial amount of money.




Password Management

Another major source of money waste is with the management of passwords. META Group research, conducted on behalf of PricewaterhouseCoopers, concluded that helpdesk tickets for password resets cost annually $60.93 per employee and 45 percent of all helpdesk calls are for password resets.

This doesn’t take into account the cost of time of employees who have to deal with password resets. Think about the time it takes for both the end user and the IT employee to reset a password.  Everyone is familiar with how annoying it is when they forget their password. You need to stop what you are doing to call the helpdesk, who in turn create a helpdesk ticket and manually reset your password. In addition to the annoyance, it has a negative impact on customer service if this happens to an employee when they are assisting one of your customers.

Though it is not a highly technical task, it takes time away from the both the end user and help desk employee, time which could be used doing something more productive.

Cost Saving Solutions

So how can these costs be reduced without a huge implementation of an expensive solution? First, let’s take a look at the account management issues. Something as simple as a solution that automates the account management process can save a great deal of money. By automating the account management process, highly technical staff no longer has to handle tasks that can easily be performed by other employees. The task can be easily delegated to a less technical helpdesk staff member or other employees in the company. With an automated account management solution, less technical employees can easily manage employee accounts using a secure form. They simply enter or make changes to an employee account in Active Directory, and the changes are automatically made in the connected systems and applications. Instead of having to manually create, change or disable accounts, the employee in charge of account management can just enter the information into the pre-set form so it is easier, and errors become less likely.

This is also beneficial when it comes to license costs. Instead of paying for accounts for employees that are no longer with the company, an automated account management solution allows you to simply check a box in the employee’s profile and all accounts are automatically disabled. Many solutions also provide an overview of access rights. This allows managers to see exactly who has access to what systems and applications to ensure they are paying for the correct number of licenses. If, say, there are any errors in access rights, an automated account management solution allows them to easily be corrected.

So what about the password resets? The easy solution to this is a self-service password reset solution.  Just like on many banking websites, numerous organizations have been implementing password reset solutions for their employees to use in the work setting. Employees simply enroll by providing answers to several challenge questions and when they need to reset a password the user simply provides the correct answer to the questions and are able to easily and securely reset their passwords without having to contact the IT department. This one small solution can save an organization hundreds or thousands of dollars each year, as well as alleviate many headaches for organizational leaders.

These simple solutions are both cost efficient and allow organizations to easily reduce costs for otherwise costly processes that often take up a large amount of time.

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