Active Directory Simplifies Employee User Management
Employees also were initially resistant to self-service help desk options, Hughes recalled. Employees would wait on service calls for up to an hour simply to reset their passwords. But eventually, resetting passwords became a widely accepted self-service task. “We’ve seen our wait times at our service desks drop dramatically,” Hughes said.
The Microsoft Azure Active Directory solution also simplifies deprovisioning users, he added. “User provisioning is pretty simple. Deprovisioning over the years has been a challenge.”
“One click, and essentially, I can now deprovision a user. We can not only take away their access to Microsoft Office 365 but we have our VPN within Azure AD as well. With one click, we can deprovision items. It’s a fairly clean and simple process,” Hughes said.
Massachusetts government employees across nine cabinet agencies use about 300 applications in total, and the commonwealth has made remarkable progress in migrating and unifying accounts for their use.
WATCH: Ohio officials explain how state citizens use the OH|ID platform for identity management.
Centralization of Citizen Services Poses Different Challenges
The government has made less progress to date on identity and access management for constituents and citizen services. So far, the government has unified only three applications through a shared IAM solution.
The largest application available for citizens is the commonwealth’s unemployment insurance system, which is not yet integrated into a single identity system.
“We just signed a contract to replace the unemployment insurance online system in Massachusetts, so we’ve opted not to migrate the identity service of that UI online as we move forward in the project,” Hughes said.
Massachusetts IT officials also are very aware that an upcoming election and a new administration could prove disruptive to a citizen IAM initiative. Hughes encouraged the next administration to begin a journey map of the citizen experience to lay the foundation for the adoption of a uniform IAM solution for citizen services.
“How do we start to really leverage it for our constituents, whether it’s a citizen, a taxpayer or a visitor doing business in the commonwealth?” he asked. “What do we need to move forward? There are a number of states doing it today, so this is of interest to us as well.”
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