Since 2021, American workers have been leaving their jobs in record numbers first due to The Great Resignation, and more recently, ongoing waves of layoffs. This sharp shift in behavior has caused many companies to scramble to keep up, especially when it comes to their offboarding processes. In fact, recent research shows that one third of enterprises lose more than 10% of their associated technology assets when offboarding workers, and 42% experience unauthorized access to SaaS applications and cloud resources.
Have you assessed your employee offboarding process?
To gauge the maturity of your employee offboarding process, ask yourself these five questions:
Data hygiene
We begin with data hygiene. Do you have access to accurate data about the state of your technology assets and who has access to these assets, both for your employees and contractors?
Without accurate data about the assets an employee or contractor has access to, then you’ll struggle to properly revoke this access. With mid to large enterprises using, on average, over 180 SaaS applications, it can be extremely time consuming to manually verify if a former employee’s access to all applications and cloud instances has been properly removed.
Documented process
Has your offboarding process been fully documented? If not, then it can be a nightmare to manage and evaluate your team’s collection of ad hoc actions to know if they completed all their offboarding tasks correctly and if the offboarding process has been properly implemented.
Cross organizational visibility
Do all relevant stakeholders across the organization have visibility into the status of an on-going employee offboarding? In other words, do they receive notifications when tasks aren’t completed on time or correctly? If not, then uncompleted tasks can fall silently through the cracks. One financial services company did an audit of previously offboarded employees and discovered that more than 20 of them were still getting paid.
Audit readiness
Can you easily validate that an offboarding process was successfully completed for audit purposes? Or is your team constantly scrambling to fill out logs when an audit is announced?
Cost to offboard an employee
Do you know the total expense to offboard an employee when you factor in the costs of all manual tasks? Or is your offboarding process so complicated and ad hoc that you don’t really know what it costs? Do you also know the costs to the business for unreturned corporate-owned devices and application licenses, which is a common occurrence when employees aren’t offboarded properly?
Why is employee offboarding so challenging?
If you’re like most CIOs or others responsible for your company’s offboarding process, you likely answered ‘no’ to many, if not all, of these questions. Why is that?
To begin, your overall technology portfolio has likely become extremely complex over the past decade due to your business leveraging a variety of asset types, such as a myriad of SaaS applications, hybrid cloud deployments, IOT devices, and technology supporting a remote workforce.
This complex technology landscape is likely managed by a variety of siloed tools run by siloed groups. Everyone has their own tools: networking, security, DevOps to name a few. Implementing IT processes — like employee offboarding — that span across these point tools become filled with manual tasks, causing your IT teams to swivel from one console to another to gather the required data.
These manual tasks also require manual updating of the status of technology assets, which is problematic simply because employees are people: they get busy and forget. This means the database tracking of your technology assets — like a CMDB — becomes inaccurate, making it difficult to fully trust your good data hygiene for your complex technology landscape.
Combining manual processes with potentially inaccurate data is a recipe for improperly performed processes, leading to cost inefficiencies, security vulnerabilities, and audit issues.
Are you ready for the journey to autonomous IT?
Automation promises an answer to these challenges. Unfortunately, the promise of IT automation (that we’ve been hearing about for over two decades) hasn’t manifested for a variety of reasons:
- Integration across tools and departments can be difficult.
- Different departments feel a need to protect their systems, not wanting IT to play around in their “sandboxes”.
- Limitations exist around which tools can talk to each other.
- Significant data hygiene issues lead to a paradox: Automating with garbage data just makes the garbage go faster.
REST APIs could help to flip the script. They provide a (relatively) standardized interface to virtually every platform and tool used by the modern enterprise. The industry should consider delivering enterprise-class applications that leverage these APIs to deliver the functionality required to automate common IT processes like employee offboarding.
Of course, the idea of writing software to automate common processes is not a new concept. There was a time when salespeople used a Rolodex to manage their contacts. Then some smart people realized that a large number of salespeople required pretty standard functionality to do their jobs, so they wrote software to help automate the management of customer relationships, giving rise to the CRM application category.
Now is the time for the industry to step up and take a similar approach by providing CIOs and IT with functionally pre-packaged applications that deliver common IT processes — like employee offboarding — to help the CIO make autonomous IT operations a reality.
