How to use HR data to configure application access accounts?

Account creation upon the arrival of an employee

When a new employee arrives, the Onboarding step is fundamental. For the IT team, this is the time to create accounts in the various applications and prepare the hardware for the new arrival.

Account creation is the most tedious task. It is, in fact, increasingly so: applications are multiplying, and for each of these applications, account creation requires more and more configuration.

An employee has an average of about fifteen applications. Each of these applications has about 5 parameters (this figure is very largely underestimated, for example, for Active Directory, which has several dozen). And each parameter requires copy-pasting between the HR administrative information and the administration interfaces to create the different accounts.

1 new employee = 15 applications = 15 x 5 parameters to enter = 150 copy/paste operations to perform

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Retrieving administrative information for a new employee is necessary to create their access accounts for Active Directory, Office 365, GSuite, etc.

The different types of fields and information

There are several types of information:

• Raw information: This is information that is copied and pasted without any transformation: the employee's first or last name that is entered as is in the corresponding fields on the application on which the account is to be created.

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• ‍Calculated information: this is information that is transformed based on the information available. For example, to "manufacture" the login field (UPN, LoginName...), we will use the first letter of the first name followed by a period and the last name.‍

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• Transformed information: Thanks to correspondence tables, the values to be filled in are transformed from HR information. For example, an Organizational Unit (OU) in Active Directory can be determined from the user's geographical location, which will have been converted using a correspondence table. In Excel, this is the equivalent of the VLOOKUP function.

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• Operational information: This is perhaps the most difficult information to obtain, as it is only known to the operational team (often the manager) who does not yet have the information at the time of account creation. For example, a salesperson to whom you want to assign a "territory" in Salesforce. This information can be defined well after the employee's arrival, for example, when their probationary period is confirmed.

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• ‍Transverse information: this information is retrieved from another resource. For example, the badge number that we want to report on one of the Active Directory fields and that must therefore be retrieved once the badge has been created and assigned.

How to retrieve HR information

HR information is relatively easy to retrieve from the HRIS. APIs or exported files provide the necessary information for creating accounts. For more information on this point, you can consult this article on HRIS.

How to integrate HR data into applications

This is where the difficulty begins :)

Because it is precisely this integration of transformed or raw information that is tedious. Manually, everyone can do it: it involves copying/pasting or simply entering information into account creation interfaces. The interfaces are more or less ergonomic, but the entry is somewhat assisted with drop-down lists, check boxes, or choices to be made in predefined lists.

Automation is complex because it requires scripting the account creation process for each application. Each application has its own "language": API, script, batch, PowerShell, SQL, etc. It is difficult to develop automations for each application and, above all, to maintain them. It is also necessary to support new applications that regularly arrive and populate the application repository.

That's why it's preferable to use a tool to automate the different creations in the different applications. Youzer allows you to manage SaaS or on-premise applications, on different technologies and different environments.