It used to take weeks to provide a new employee. You spend so much effort on the required hardware, software, and his access rights. These days, nobody has that much patience anymore. You and your users rightfully expect the employee onboarding to proceed quick and easy. You want to be just as speedily as you’re used to when visiting your cell phone provider’s website or local store to order a new cell phone contract along with a new mobile device.

Employee Onboarding step-by-step

You’re in luck – it doesn’t have to take that long. All you need is a modern service management solution. It automates the time consuming steps of the process for you. In my experience it has proven to ease the following five steps:

1. Your HR system needs to automatically inform your service management solution about the new employee. Along with all the information about the new one – his preferences, special wishes and so on. This way, IT can immediately assign him the appropriate access rights in the Active Directory. Also you ensure he’ll have the most awesome first day experience!
2. The new colleague’s manager should be able to order the devices and software he needs by day one. With the right solution and workflow your service management software covers this for you
3. Because everybody’s mobile these days you also need to provision apps. A good EMM Solution integrates with your Service Management seamlessly. It deploys the apps preconfigured so it’s just switching on the phone and using it. Same experience with the right Client Management integrated in your ITSM Solution.
4. On his first day of work, the new colleague can now receive the requested mobile devices directly from the provider. Upon starting the mobile device, a message leads him via link to an automated device configuration. This allows the device to be added to the managed devices pool without further intervention.
5. The new employee has to be able to easily and conveniently order additional software for his notebook or mobile devices. Mobile apps need to enable such requests as well as their approval by his superior even while traveling.

Requirements for an automated Employee Onboarding

To automate this process in an end-to-end fashion, the service management solution must meet the following five requirements:

1. It has to feature a powerful graphical workflow engine. This must support all relevant ITIL processes. Out-of-the-box Change Management and Request Fulfilment Workflows are essential!
2. Workflows need to be flexibly adapted to individual enterprise procedures such as approval or escalation routines. This needs to be achieved – and this is important! – by configuration alone, not by coding, making sure the solution remains updatable.
3. A self-service interface has to quickly and easily allow both – the end user and his superior – to initiate service requests in a convenient and intuitive way by service catalog.
4. The service management solution needs to feature a graphical design tool to allow for customization of self-service interfaces and the necessary forms on an as-needed basis.
5. And finally the solution needs to provide APIs for interaction with installed systems so as to connect to existing databases or the HR system. End-to- end automation of the employee onboarding process is only possible if the service management solution offers this high level of automation, flexibility, self-service functionality, API support, and coding-free customization. Therefore, administrators should check their legacy solution for these features if they want to keep up with state of the art technology.

Additional information regarding this topic can be found in the whitepaper “From Firefighter to Service Provider”