What is a self-service environment?

A self-service environment is a portal, standalone application, or component of a business application that allows users to retrieve information and execute digital processes independently.

What is IAM self-service?

IAM self-service is a concept in which users or managers can request or modify IT licenses, accounts, and access rights independently. With IAM self-service, you relieve the helpdesk.

Self-Service

Q: What is self-service?

Self-service refers to digital solutions that allow customers or users to obtain or manage services or products independently without assistance from a staff member.

What is Self-Service?

Self-service is a service delivery model in which users can submit requests, make changes, and perform other actions as independently and directly as possible. There are many self-service examples, ranging from buying products online to online banking.

People naturally think of the direct self-service model, where you handle tasks through a self-service portal. As an IT provider, we also see demand for manager self-service, which enables managers to handle tasks for their own employees independently. At Tools4ever, we therefore distinguish between these two types of self-service and explain them in more detail below. We also cover the benefits of self-service and focus specifically on self-service capabilities within the identity and access management domain.

Types of Self-Service Within Organizations

As noted, we distinguish two forms of self-service within organizations:

Self-service solutions for users (employees) to manage multiple tasks through self-service portals. This often involves HR tasks, and in many organizations, you receive an employee portal account during onboarding to view your pay stubs, for example. Employees also increasingly have self-scheduling capabilities in scheduling and planning systems, and within identity and access management, they can often request additional licenses or access rights themselves.
There is also the indirect form of self-service that targets managers who independently handle tasks for their employees. This starts with HR tasks such as leave and absence management, but you can also schedule employees for training or directly provision additional IT and other facilities. To this end, we provide managers with a user-friendly management portal that lets them configure these items directly.

Benefits of Self-Service

Self-service delivers numerous benefits. We provide examples and distinguish among users and employees, managers, and the organization as a whole:

Within the organization, users experience a much better user experience. You do not have to deal with complex procedures that depend on support staff availability. You can handle as much as possible directly yourself, at the time and place that suits you best.
As a manager, self-service makes you more efficient and effective. Taking on many tasks for your team members yourself also makes you more engaged. Without self-service, you can review your team’s absence figures and license usage. But when you are closer to the controls, the information becomes more actionable, and you work with it more actively.
As an organization, you benefit from improved operational efficiency, effectiveness, and scalability. Because processes must be standardized and automated for self-service, this also directly contributes to your compliance with laws and regulations.

Self-Service Account and Access Management

We already mentioned that you can make account and access management within organizations more efficient and user-friendly with self-service. In an organization with hundreds or even thousands of employees and dozens of applications, identity and access management quickly becomes highly complex. This is especially true because many business applications, such as Electronic Patient Records (EPR), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) tools, or municipal case management systems, do not use simple accounts. The internal permission structures of such systems are usually very complex. Within an EDP, for example, you must set permissions so that each clinician can perform only those actions for which they are qualified, and only for the department and patients for which they are responsible. Employees also regularly rotate roles or departments, and new hires join every week. People often need additional licenses and access rights for a temporary project, want to change their email name, or reset their password. In practice, IT staff sometimes spend recurring half-day blocks exclusively on account and access changes.

With a modern IAM solution like HelloID, you can address this in two ways:

A large part of this can be addressed through automated account and access provisioning. You do this based on Role-Based Access Control or Attribute-Based Access Control. You define clear rules that automatically grant the correct accounts and permissions based on a person’s role, department, location, and other user attributes. We accomplish this in HelloID with our Provisioning module, which, on average, automates about 80 percent of administrative actions.
You still have about 20 percent of incidental administrative tasks that end up at the helpdesk. These include accounts and rights that cannot be directly derived one-to-one from a person’s role or department. For example, a business analyst needs a specific design tool for one of his projects. Similarly, someone may have a secondary duty and need access to a project share or a shared mailbox. For these individual actions, self-service is the solution.

Self-Service Within Your Identity and Access Management Platform

How do we support self-service within an IAM platform like HelloID? Within HelloID, we use the Service Automation module to streamline and automate IAM service processes. We offer two ways to enable managers and employees to perform administrative tasks independently online:

Delegation of IT Tasks

Many administrative tasks must ultimately be implemented in back-end systems such as Active Directory. These are complex applications and are therefore often handled by second-line administrators. With Service Automation, we can delegate these tasks to first-line staff (helpdesk delegation), managers, and key users. Service Automation uses delegated forms that allow the delegated employee to enter the correct data and easily activate the change. As a first-line staff member, key user, or manager, you have access only to those forms. The Service Automation module ensures that changes are applied to the underlying systems without errors. This keeps self-service administration fully secure while delivering improved efficiency and usability.

Self-Service Portal

If desired, we can delegate some actions entirely to end users. With Service Automation self-service, you can request IT resources directly when needed. This can include a specific application, a new mailbox, or additional storage. You will want to maintain control over IT resources, and HelloID does so with smart, configurable workflows that automatically route online requests to the right approvers. The system can also automatically verify that an employee meets specified criteria before granting access.

This illustrates that you can provide self-service at two levels for your account and access management. At the end-user and team manager levels, managers can independently perform tasks for their teams.

Want to Learn More About Self-Service?

Want to learn more about the self-service capabilities of our HelloID Service Automation module? The Service Automation page on our site provides a complete overview of features and capabilities.