User Account Management in Education: The True Cost

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The pace of technology today is rapid, and student bodies continue to embrace it at an exponential pace creating an ever increasing demand for internet based services crossing many different areas of the organizational structure. Ask any student or faculty member how many web based services they use on a daily basis and you’re likely to get an answer of 12 or more. Consider the fact that almost every single service requires a unique username and password. Let’s assume the user base is at least 10,000 combined students, staff, and faculty. This equates to 120,000 or so accounts total; how much time and energy goes into the accurate creation and management of them? Couple this with the fact that all three types of users may enter and exit the institution in a random fashion, and the administrative overhead becomes even more daunting.

It is actually quite easy to quantify this fixed cost since the skills required to do so are best defined under the job title Senior Systems Administrator. According to PayScale.com the average national salary for this position is $78,394; add 40% for payroll, healthcare, and other costs and the total becomes at least $109,753.

Figure one, seen directly below, breaks down the total minutes per year required to manage the creation, updating, and removal of unique username/password combinations. What’s seen in figure two is the total minutes worked per year by someone on the IT staff whose skills and compensation fall within the previously defined boundaries.

We now have all the information required to compute the per minute cost of the Senior Systems Administrator, and thus the overhead associated with managing all user account related activities. Figure three beaks down cost for a variety of intervals and culminates with figure four where the one, three, and five year costs are bottom lined.

It stands to reason that any reduction is these costs would yield a savings. Implementing the products manufactured, and services provided, by Tools4ever organizations will realize a significant cost savings over a five year period.

This is easily accomplished using technology which specializes in effectively linking payroll and student information systems to the wide variety of applications used by the people whose information is contained therein. IT staff employees no longer need to spend time at the keyboard entering user information and executing scripts. Furthermore, the installation, configuration, deployment, and testing of the solution is completed in around one week for typical implementations.

Learn more about Identity and Access Management in Education.

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