Sun Microsystems and Deloitte & Touche LLPhave formed Employee Life Cycle Management (ELCM) to help companies manage employee access to critical services more efficiently, less expensively, and with greater levels of security.
By combining Deloitte & Touche’s i-MAAP identity management program with Sun’s identity management offering (including the recently acquired Waveset Lighthouse product), the ELCM solution aims to help increase workforce productivity and operational efficiency through the automated management of human resources questions.
“Our customers’ success is based on their ability to manage human resources competitively, and in the context of efficient business processes,” says Ted DeZabala, partner and national security services leader at Deloitte & Touche. “We are pleased to work with Sun to help lead the industry in providing a highly integrated identity management solution based on PeopleSoft HCM. As part of this solution, Sun is providing comprehensive identity management functionality and a unique architectural approach that enable customers to address complex security risks while extending business initiatives across a broad range of operational environments. By working collaboratively with Sun, we can deploy solutions that can deliver quantifiable business results quickly to our clients.”
Managing user information throughout an employee’s tenure can be a costly, time-consuming and error-prone process. Research has shown that in addition to significant management and operational overhead, enterprises today spend up to four weeks to fully enable access to the proper IT resources for a new employee. Implementation of the ELCM solution can free IT staff to focus on other areas, which can result in greatly improved operational efficiency and security.
“Enterprises are increasingly making their human resource application the authoritative source for internal workforce identity information. However, they have a huge gap in managing their external workforce – temporary workers, consultants, contractors, etc.,” says Roberta J. Witty, research director in Gartner Inc.’s Security and Risk group. “Identity management products must integrate with the human resource application for workforce status changes, such as additions, transfers or relocations, and terminations, in order to automate access request approvals and the provisioning of IT resources. And, identity management projects must start to address the handling of the external workforce. This will require that enterprises standardize the processes around the employment practices for this increasingly important part of the workforce.”