Enterprise IT Onboarding

I’ve worked at many organisations, from educational establishments up to multinational banks and corporations. My gripe with all of them is they never make the Enterprise IT on-boarding process slick.

The Enterprise IT adoption cycle visualised
Graphic ©2012 Simon Wardley and CC BY-SA 3.0

Some of the smaller companies I’ve worked for are different. I had to wait a week to get a building pass once because the only badge printer was faulty, and at another company, they’d actually run out of access cards and simply stuck a white sticker over somebody else’s card and told me to use that. Security let me through and in to the building with a quick flash of a piece of plastic with the company’s logo on it and nothing more.

That’s small companies – but in large companies, people join all the time and it really should be a business-as-usual (BAU) process.

Last week, I went to a new a customer site last week to collect a building access card and get set up on their email system.  I was in and out of the building within 30 minutes.  I had an ID card and building access sorted immediately by the security team, which let me go up to the floor I’d be working on and get email access.

My manager gave me a piece of paper with my username and temporary password, and on logging on to the nearest thin client, I had access to everything I needed. Remote access was a breeze – the first email in my Inbox contained instructions on how to get access to my virtual desktop remotely using Citrix and Google Authenticator.

Why can’t everyone’s on-boarding process be like this slick?