Return On Investment (ROI)
This document focuses on several key areas of user account management where considerable savings can be realized upon implementation of User Management Resource Administrator (UMRA). With UMRA system administrators can put into place a truly scalable and powerful solution for handling all user management tasks in the organization and reduce IT operating costs. Direct savings
This category of savings will be directly visible after the introduction of UMRA. To calculate these direct savings, statistical data from the helpdesk can be used (number of calls, duration of calls, number of employees involved, etc.).  | Increase in efficiency
The effort of managing user accounts is considerably reduced. On average, creating a new user account takes approximately 20 minutes; UMRA reduces this time to 2-3 minutes. The same applies to editing and updating user accounts, unlocking and resetting passwords, deleting user accounts, etc.
| | Increased service level
The introduction of UMRA drastically shortens the response time for servicing user management requests (from the moment the request is received until the actual mutation of the user account). UMRA allows the Helpdesk to process these requests independently, fast and without errors. Updated user accounts will therefore be available to the organization much faster. The aspect of processing requests without error cannot be emphasized enough. Both the time required to fix errors in systems administration and the impact of these errors on the organization as a whole are often strongly underestimated.
| | Delegating tasks to non-admins
The UMRA interface for non-admins is simple and secure. This means that it is no longer necessary to involve a highly skilled and busy administrator to manage all user account management tasks. Complex tasks such as account creation, account migration, renaming accounts (e.g. after a marriage) and updating security rights are all greatly simplified and can be executed by any delegated user without any previous knowledge of Active Directory.
| Indirect savings
The introduction of UMRA also results in indirect savings. These savings will not be immediately visible and are more difficult to quantify. The damage caused by system administration errors usually only surface when an incident occurs. The cost of repairing these damages can be substantial. UMRA prevents these incidents from ever occurring. | Limited distribution of Admin rights
Without UMRA, every employee involved in user account management will need multiple privileges in the company network. This forms a security issue, since it means that a Helpdesk employee may have privileges to view and change network resources (e.g. viewing the mailbox of company executives or the company's payroll). Using UMRA, privileges can be minimized and incidents will occur less often. The Helpdesk employee will only be allowed to execute specific tasks (specified by the administrator) and nothing else.
| | Auditing and management control information
UMRA offers logging, auditing and reporting functionalities to monitor all network activities. This makes it possible to determine exactly who did what, when, and where on the network. Tracing the cause of an incident therefore becomes much easier. Another possible application is to collect management control information. These data can be used to organize Helpdesk tasks more efficiently. The auditing function also makes UMRA fully compliant with government regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, etc.
| | More professional image of the IT department
Helpdesk requests will be answered much faster and without errors. This elevates the service level and contributes to a more professional image towards the end users. It will also allow the helpdesk to focus on other projects allowing for quicker implementations.
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