News
South London and Maudsley NHS Trust secures 8,000 IT user accounts
with Novell Identity Manager
13 October 2009
South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust (SLaM) has automated
the management of 8,000 user accounts for its IT network by using Novell
Identity Manager.
Creating, changing and removing user accounts was a paper-based
process in which application forms were faxed to the IT department. A
combination of data entry errors, poor handwriting, and illegible faxes,
resulted in a process that was slow and fraught with error. With such a
high volume of staff change, SLaM was creating, changing or disabling
around 200 accounts every month.
The NHS National Programme for IT (NPfIT) selected Novell Identity
Manager as its preferred solution, with an enterprise licence agreement
covering all NHS organisations. For SLaM, the only expense was engaging
with Novell business partner Salford Software to complete the
implementation. SLaM uses the NHS Employee Staff Records (ESR) system,
which holds human resources and payroll data for all employees.
The ESR data populates Microsoft Active Directory, which controls
user access rights for SLaM systems. When an 'offer of employment'
letter is sent, the HR department updates ESR. Novell Identity Manager
collects the new ESR and Active Directory data and automatically creates
new accounts with the correct access permissions.
If an employee changes job or role, Novell Identity Manager reflects
the updated ESR data automatically, granting or revoking user access
rights based on the Active Directory permissions. When a person joins or
leaves the Trust, internal systems are triggered to add or remove the
user from the internal staff directories.
Novell Identity Manager acts as a synchronisation hub between the ESR
and Active Directory system, managing passwords for application access.
For specific areas, such as a pharmacy stock control package, Novell
Identity Manager manages single sign-on so that users do not need to log
in to each application separately.
By integrating Novell Identity Manager, the NHS Employee Staff
Records system and Microsoft Active Directory, SLaM has eliminated its
previous manual process for adding, moving, changing and deleting users
for the vast majority of accounts.
As a result, error rates in provisioning have declined to zero, the
IT department no longer has to deal with mountains of faxes, and Novell
Identity Manager automatically manages all the regular employee
accounts.
Chris Irving, IT service manager for SLaM, said, “We have reduced the
administration requirement, which is a significant saving for SLaM. With
Novell Identity Manager, we have reduced the time to provision a new
user from as much as two days to just four hours. Requiring users to
remember only one set of credentials for accessing applications has
improved end-user satisfaction and productivity, and reduced
password-related calls to the service desk. We will introduce password
self-service capabilities using Novell Identity Manager that will cut
down the number of service desk calls, and are planning to extend single
sign-on to more applications."
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