December 2007 — News
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How a Security Play Streamlined a Business Process in a Texas School District
Do kids as young as 7 actually understand the basics of logging in and using shared drives on the network? According to Berger, yes. The system creates a user name based on first initial, middle initial, and last name. The password is their user ID. "Once they log in, it's just basic teaching, computer use, file structure, saving to the network drive," said Berger. "Then they know they can get it from anywhere."
Change Management Challenges
The integration work wasn't only technical in nature. It also involved change management for the participants--staff, students, and IT people. With the aid of EST Group, an Arlington-based Novell consulting company, Berger and his team mapped out the process as it currently stood, then conferred with everybody who held a role in the process to confirm their piece of the workflow. From there it was streamlined. "Then I would go back to each stakeholder [to work through] where their part of the process was affected," he said.
A major obstacle was the hands-off nature of the automation. "You try to take that paper copy away from somebody and they get really nervous," Berger pointed out. So, as part of the process, e-mails would be delivered daily to those who wanted them, spelling out additions, deletions, and changes to network access. "A lot of them, at first, wanted the e-mail. Then they'd come back and say, 'You know, I don't need to know; it's working.'"
The IT people also monitored activities closely in the early days of the automation. Their attitude, said Berger, was, "'I've been doing this two or three days a week, and now the machine's doing it for me.' So they would sit there and watch it on the screen as it automatically ran through the log."
Sorting out the business flow took about a week, said Berger. Then configuring the IDM program and doing the SIF integration with the help of EST took another three weeks.
Now that the automation has been working for a year and a half, "the floodgates opened," said Berger. "'What about this process.' 'Can we do this now?' 'How about this?' Whenever I'm in a meeting now, it's always, 'Can we just automate all of this now?'"
The Price and Advice
Berger estimated that the implementation of Novell IDM and Storage Manager saved the district $25,000 in its first year alone. He said the price of IDM under education pricing runs between $0.50 and $1 per student. The total, including Storage Manager, is about $2.
Berger offered this advice to others considering an identity management solution. "Define the core business processes that you want to address with it. Don't try to tackle the whole thing right away. Find a few key processes that might really be tying up a lot of departments or a lot of time internally in your department. Start small and then build it up. Let everybody get comfortable with it before you just go out and take all the paper away."
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About the author: Dian Schaffhauser covers high tech, business and higher education for a number of publications. Contact her at dian@dischaffhauser.com.
Proposals for articles and tips for news stories, as well as questions and comments about this publication, should be submitted to David Nagel, executive editor, at dnagel@1105media.com.
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