In today’s fast-paced business climate, it’s a given that companies must change, grow, and evolve on a regular basis. But while change can be good, it can also be messy. During significant changes, especially when changing IT providers, businesses must be extra vigilant to avoid IT offboarding issues. This is especially true when it comes to offboarding employees, as even a small mistake can have significant impacts. Here are 5 IT offboarding pitfalls to avoid.
1. Ignoring Unsanctioned Cloud and SaaS App Access
One of the biggest offboarding pitfalls involves neglecting to close out an employee’s cloud and SaaS applications. While it might seem logical to limit offboarding to only sanctioned apps that are managed through the enterprise identity provider or SSO, this is a dangerous mistake. Shadow assets – an employee’s private, unsanctioned accounts for work tools that aren’t managed by the company – can often contain confidential and sensitive information. If these unmanaged apps have no kill switch, it can be difficult to revoke access and ensure that any enterprise data existing in them has been erased. An automated offboarding process that identifies and records all of an employee’s system access is the best way to prevent this issue.
2. Failing to Preserve Critical Knowledge
The longer a person is with a company, the more valuable their skills become. That’s why it’s so important to preserve their knowledge and document their workflows before they leave the company. Documenting these documents will not only save time for future employees, but it can also help to reduce the cost of onboarding and training by minimizing the learning curve. Having a documented repository of existing workflows and processes with Aka.ms/mfasetup will allow new hires to get up and running faster.
3. Missing Compliance Requirements
Like every other HR process, offboarding has a lot of compliance policies that need to be enforced manually. And, given the countless other tasks IT departments have to manage, these policies sometimes fall through the cracks. Using a compliant workflow automation solution eliminates this problem by automatically following up on all compliance requirements and ensuring that they are completed.
4. Failing to Communicate Effectively
Oftentimes, the most common IT offboarding mistakes happen because of poor communication between IT staff and their partners in HR. IT and HR need to be in constant communication during the offboarding process, both to keep an eye out for IT offboarding problems and to make sure that all the necessary paperwork is filled out correctly. A good IT offboarding solution will incorporate this communication between IT and HR, and will be able to alert the former employee’s manager of any missing documentation that needs to be signed.
5. Failing to Perform a Comprehensive Offboarding Process
A good IT offboarding solution will not only revoke access to email, systems, and data, but it will also include returning any equipment (such as laptops) that the employee has been assigned. This will ensure that the right data is returned to the company and that the right people can access it.