How did Skill&You save time and improve reliability in its audits?

Skill&You is a distance learning and training organization present in several European countries.

• 120,000 students in 2021
• 14 schools
• 1300 employees
• many application tools developed internally

Their needs:

• Centralize account creation requests
• Comply with the prerogatives of the auditors as part of audits on the management of entitlements and identities

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"There's been a pretty strong direct adoption of Youzer, they [employees within the IT department] are very happy with Youzer. It's become part of the internal vernacular of HR and others 'have you done a Youzer?"

Dimitri Chevtchenko - CIO

What was the problem at Skill&You?

In its early days, Skill&You had a more modest internal organization where it was easy to ask the IT teams to create accounts for new arrivals. Then the company developed very quickly and the workforce increased very significantly.

The initial proximity between the HR and IT teams remained, but the increasing flow of access requests to the various applications had to be managed.

These account creation requests for new employees were transmitted through various channels (email, telephone, tickets, etc.) and were becoming increasingly numerous, requiring more and more attention. Indeed, the auditors requested annual audits and carried out regular checks, which left no room for inaccuracies.

To obtain traceability of an account creation request, it was necessary to find the history of emails, tickets, etc. Account creation request templates had been set up (using forms included in emails), but this was not enough to have a real tool for managing authorization governance. Skill&You needed a tool to centralize requests and have real traceability on authorizations.

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👉 “Moving away from a somewhat artisanal approach and the regulatory requirements of the auditors have compelled us to adopt a tool.”

How was the search for an entitlement management solution carried out?

Dimitri Chevtchenko (CIO of Skill&You) was familiar with the IAM (Identity and Access Management) tools of large groups, industrial solutions, but they were not adapted to their needs. Indeed, these are often extremely cumbersome solutions to configure and use. He was not aware of any tools adapted to the size of his company.

For him, IAM encompasses the infrastructure and server aspects, and he was looking for a solution for identity management, account lifecycle management, and user management.

"When I discovered Youzer, I found a solution tailored to our needs that met my expectations. We develop software in-house. We can be seen as a Software As A Service publisher, since we develop a Learning Management System for 120,000 learners.
We're kind of in this business of creating software, solutions, so Youzer spoke to me.
There was also the French solution aspect and the responsiveness part that hit the nail on the head."

What appealed to Skill&You about the Youzer application?

"Youzer has idea boxes and we feel that they really listen to customer requests. Youzer really listens to what we submit to them to build the road map."

Dimitri Chevtchenko

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Some vendors may sometimes claim that they are close to their customers and that they build their application according to their requests, but this is not always true. Skill&You genuinely feels a healthy approach to co-developing the product based on user needs.

“It's very pleasant to say to yourself, I quickly need a connector: we go to the catalog, we configure the connector and we have it, it's simple.”

Youzer was quickly adopted by the Skill&You teams. Initially, the IT team configured the connectors and explored how to create the packages needed to automate account creation, but the solution didn't require a significant amount of their time.

Compared to large market solutions aimed at large accounts, where it might have been necessary to install a server, with Youzer, the IT team quickly becomes operational.

Dimitri also greatly appreciates the space shared with other clients to submit new ideas for the application, as it creates a community aspect.

Youzer has implemented a collaborative space where everyone can propose application improvements and vote on other people's ideas. These votes allow the Youzer technical team to prioritize application improvements, helping to best meet customer needs.

"We see how people vote, we wouldn't necessarily have had the ideas and I think that's great."
"It's really a solution that gets to the heart of the matter."

Dimitri Chevtchenko

How did Youzer help the Skill&You teams?

Account creation was already well controlled, but Youzer has made it possible to industrialize the process and has facilitated processes within the IT department.

The primary objective for Skill&You: the regulatory aspect and the traceability of authorizations have been greatly improved.

They went from a system where they had to take screenshots, timestamp, explain the origin of the requests... to Youzer.

The auditors give a rating on an important indicator. At Skill&You, this rating turned positive because they had equipped themselves with Youzer, which allowed them to centralize, automate, and track authorization requests.

"We told the auditors that we had switched to Youzer, and they saw that it was a specialist company."

By equipping themselves with Youzer, a tool that allows IT teams to perform checks, Skill&You was able to provide reports, present them, and their rating turned green.

"Without Youzer, I would have had to hire a technician to do all the tracing of the provisionnings."

Significant time savings have been achieved, and even on a daily basis, the infrastructure manager spends less time centralizing or reconstructing information.

What are the next steps with Youzer?

The IT team would like to go further now; they have industrialized the account creation processes and now want to implement account deletion. There are still quite a few manual actions.

The team uses account creation forms a lot; now, they have changed their HRIS and want to integrate it with Youzer for automation to simplify the lives of HR and technicians.

Then, the IT team will integrate its telephony into Youzer since it has just changed it.

The goal is to centralize all the tools.

Skill&You's favorite features:

• User and account lifecycle management
• Synthetic visualization of entries and exits
• Forms
• Packages
• CSV extractions

Would you recommend Youzer?

"When I have a product that's easily adopted, there are no irritants, everyone's happy and it doesn't become an issue, that's great.

We share our needs with Youzer, and they are taken into account. Youzer is a human-sized company that responds quickly, and I feel that the Youzer team is passionate about the tool they are developing. They want to see it evolve.

I'm talking to other start-ups where things are evolving, but not much. There, we feel that they are really listening to the needs in terms of functionalities and that they are interested.

What we report to them helps to build the roadmap. There are ideas that they would not have thought of that are brought by the customers and that are put in place.”

Good feeling, it works well, it's square. For me, it's perfect when it happens like that."