Why every organization needs to take identity management seriously.
By Petra Muolokwu
Within a period of 15 years, Nelson & Co., an outsourcing firm, had grown to become a major player in its industry. It had accrued major outposts and franchises pan globally, providing top-notch professional services for A-list local and multinational clients across different regions.
However, with business growth comes business challenges. At some point in the lifecycle of the organization, complaints began to mount from major clients. There were major customer service gaps, service failures as well as security breaches. On a few of the instances, Nelson & Co. had to fire erring staff members often for serious negligence and gross company policy violations.
Despite all the efforts of the management team to retool and reposition the company, the same set of complaints kept coming from different quarters of their clients at different times. After a while, customer complaints evolved to customer walk-outs! after a 2-week spate, three major multinationals sacked Nelson & Co. and stopped doing business with them.
Unknown to the management of Nelson & Co., more than half of the staff that were fired from a particular region of the company had applied and gotten hired by the same company in another region. For instance, staff who were laid off for poor performance and criminal activities in the West regions easily applied to regions in the East and vice versa, still dispelling the same behaviour for which they were laid off in their previous locations.
In addition to this complex problem, some staff also maintained employment with Nelson & Co. in two different regions! The very same person would pose as a different staff in a different region. Nelson& Co., in addition to losing credibility with customers was also losing money from paying ghost workers.
It then became necessary to consolidate the various databases and manage staff identities from one central location and verify these identities against a national database — National Identification Number.
Organizations like Nelson & Co. often avoid Identity Management systems for:
1. Expensive license acquisition and maintenance fees.
2. Complex deployment of a solution
3. Bureaucracy in the deployment process.
In a bid to restore it’s company’s image and appropriate lost opportunities, Nelson of Nelson & Co. called for a press meet to enlighten the public on identity management in organizations.
According to him, “Identity management is basically the management of who people say they are, backed up by a fact. There is no identity management without the role of people or who people say they are”.
All these realizations did not happen until after Nelson & Co. had lost the business custom of 7 of the companies it used to work for. These are clients which could have been returning customers and doubled, tripled or even quadrupled its monthly revenue. The more unfortunate thing about losing just one customer is really not just the business opportunity that customer would have brought to the company, but the negative word-of-mouth that customers could engage in with other potential customers of the said company.
These are the current business realities for Mr. Nelson, who is bent on revamping the organization. You may read more on the story and learnings here. We really wish that Mr. Nelson had read our previous blog post.
Every organization, small or large needs an identity management system to manage customers’ identities or employees’ access to sensitive data. An identity management system culminates policies, processes, and technologies that enable organizations to control the access of users to it’s resources and applications. They protect their confidential information from unauthorized users.
Therefore, it is important that unauthorized parties be weeded out.
After Seamfix’s intervention, Mr. Nelson summoned the management to share the benefits gained with Seamfix cloud-based data capture and identity management system. According to him;
1. Data Quality Control -
This is one of the most prominent problems of identity management. For Nelson & Co., identities of new intakes were verified against national databases such as BVN, NIN or International Passports.
2. Central Identity Management Platform-
With a central system, captured identities can be verified, to ensure proper monitoring and management of staff activities across various regions. We also equipped Nelson & Co. with robust analytics of company-wide performance.
3. Increase in Productivity -
The adoption of an automated identity management system empowered Nelson & Co. with digital transformation capabilities and reduced the time that would otherwise have been manually spent on monitoring and verifying identities. This also influenced the staff to be more productive as reports of their operations were published nationwide and the supervisors of various regions to ensure that their regions were at par.
4. Impersonation and falsification were vehemently curbed-
With a centralized system, staff identities cannot be falsified as false records will be flagged. To this end, Nelson & Co. is able to reaffirm its credibility and deliver premium quality services.
Seamfix is constantly empowering organizations across Africa to proceed from strategy to implementation with data capture and identity management solutions, driving digital transformation in Africa and beyond with her ever-improving AI/ML supported solutions.
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Are you, or your organization passionate about data? collecting it? collating it? verifying it? analyzing it? then you are the kind of people we write for. Follow our publication, and you would gain knowledge on everything data, from the process of easy capture to the end goal of making data-driven decisions. Find out about our company SEAMFIX and how we solve big organizational issues with third-generation solutions HERE.
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Originally published at https://medium.com on September 4, 2019.