Business Layers Blazes The E-Provisioning Path

"The house [was then sold twice more, and the latest listing said it came with free long-distance service," said Lavenda, co-founder and vice president of marketing and product strategy at Business Layers, an e-provisioning software company based here. "In reality, the company was paying the bill."

Controlling security risks,to say nothing about the costs of bringing on and letting go of employees,is part of the emerging field of e-provisioning that service providers and solution providers are now tackling.

Business Layers' eProvision Day One software tracks employees and the resources they have access to based on their role in the company.

"What a lot of people don't realize is that there is significant workflow attached to bringing a person [into a company or letting a person go," said Ken Neusaenger, CEO of enterprise application integration provider ZettaWorks, Houston. "Day One runs reports on what's going on in the provisioning process so you can identify weak links and see if people are following through."

Companies can no longer afford to have new hires waiting two weeks for a laptop or a phone, Neusaenger said. Nor is it acceptable for companies to lose track of cell phones and monitors or for former employees to still be able to use company credit cards or access back-end systems.

Lavenda recalled another case where an executive asked his manager if he could hold onto his company car for a month when he resigned. His manager left the company that month, and a year later the former executive still had the car, and the company was still paying insurance and registration costs.

Recent widespread layoffs may significantly increase the number of such incidents. E-provisioning software that keeps a record of who has what is starting to become a force of its own, said service providers.

When someone joins a company, a human resources manager inputs information from a Web-based HR package into a business profile maintained by eProvision Day One. When someone leaves the company or when a project with an outside supplier ends, the software knows every resource that person or team has access to and directs individuals to collect the resources and the IT staff to turn off access. If a step in the process isn't signed off on, the software sends out reminders to collect a resource or escalates the task.

Educational institutions are showing a lot of interest in e-provisioning too, said Neusaenger, adding that a university's ever-changing population of students and personnel makes it an ideal candidate for this kind of application.

"Three years after I left the university I attended, my password still worked and I could still access their systems and I wasn't paying for it," he said. "There needs to be a single point of contact, a central provisioning area, like with [eProvision Day One, because you can't leave it in the hands of individuals alone."

E-provisioning's appeal also lies in its measurable ROI in a relatively short period of time, which helps in the sales cycle, Neusaenger said.

For Robert Booker, vice president of security solutions at Syntegra, a Minneapolis-based global consulting and integration firm, eProvision Day One introduces another layer of security for customers and uses technology to reduce customer costs.

"IT is traditionally a cost base to an organization, and with companies looking to do more with less, Day One has nice capabilities of lifting administrative burdens, reducing an organization's overall cost, improving consistency and adding an additional security layer at the same time," Booker said.