TVNZ Enhances Efficiency and Security with Activate User Management

TVNZ’s Technology Service Manager, Lisa Arthur, noticed a significant discrepancy between the 3,000 user accounts on record and the actual number of staff employed. She recognised this as a potential security risk and a driver of rising user licensing costs, with around 2,000 obsolete accounts still active.

To improve and simplify user management, Lisa and Support and Infrastructure Manager Vaughan Bosher sought an automated solution that would support their staff rather than create additional hurdles. Having previously worked with Activate’s user provisioning system, both were confident it would be the right fit.

At the same time, New Zealand was beginning to feel the impact of the global recession. As media organisations are often among the first to be affected, TVNZ was facing financial pressure and impending staff redundancies.

Despite expectations that the Activate project would be cut during these cost-saving measures, the significant time and cost efficiencies it promised convinced the executive team to proceed with the purchase.

TVNZ needed a solution that would:

• Automate user account provisioning and deactivation to reduce security risks and control licensing costs
• Streamline administrative tasks to free up the service centre for higher-value work
• Support staff management during organisational changes, including redundancies
• Ensure compliance with policies and integrate seamlessly with existing IT systems.

Activate offers a complete suite of self-service provisioning products designed for enterprise IT environments, enabling business users to manage their own IT needs without relying on manual IT support.

With Activate, users can easily request, approve and automate access to IT systems, from managing email distribution lists and shared data to handling passwords and automatically creating new user accounts. By simplifying and automating these processes, Activate reduces costs, improves service levels and strengthens security and compliance.

To automate technology service centre requests, TVNZ’s project team defined user defaults for each department, specifying which Shared Folders, Distribution Lists and SharePoint sites new staff should access.

Upon implementation,Activate immediately delivered efficiencies that allowed the service centre team to focus on higher-value technology tasks.

Lisa Arthur explained,“Instead of juggling our resourcing, we’re now getting the right people to do the right jobs, such as taking back administrative work that was given to the third-level support team because the first and second-level support teams didn’t have the capacity.

Our aim was to allow everyone in the service centre, regardless of experience, to be able to perform administrative tasks. Activate enables everyone to perform tasks consistently and correctly all the time. We used to rely on one or two people to set up user accounts manually in Active Directory. Now that we’ve put this process into Activate, anyone can do it. What’s more, it’s all fully auditable.”

Vaughan Bosher, Support and Infrastructure Manger, added, “TVNZ is a 24/7 business with staff present on site all the time, but the technology service centre only operates five days a week between 8:00am and 5:00pm. Outside of these hours there is an after-hours call out number. Automating user management processes with Activate, such as setting up a new user account or providing networking access, means that managers can now provide casual or freelance staff with access to the office system without having to wait for the service centre to open on a Monday morning.”

Before Activate, setting up a new user took an hour, involving multiple steps such as assigning distribution lists and folder access. Now, the process takes just minutes.

‍Key Benefits:

• Automated user account provisioning and access management, reducing manual effort
• Consistent, error-free administration accessible to all service centre staff
• Faster onboarding of permanent, casual and freelance employees
• Improved auditability and compliance through tracked processes
• Increased service centre efficiency, freeing staff for more strategic work
• Extended availability of access provisioning beyond service centre hours.

Activate has helped TVNZ to establish defaults for their new user workflow and all the manual tasks involved in setting up new users are now automated. This not only helps the service centre plan their day much better, but it also addresses a common IT problem, granting user access to the same groups as a colleague in the same department without knowing if they are entitled to access every group, or if those groups are still active.

The solution has also enabled appointed staff in each department to self-manage the email Distribution Lists (DLs), allowing them to add and remove people as required.It has also given visibility into who has access to the DLs.

“While we haven’t sat down and listed all the benefits and ROI, we know that Activate is saving us roughly 40 hours every week of manual system administration. We also hear from managers how they love the difference the new system has made to their work and how much faster everything is,” said Lisa.

Since the initial implementation, Lisa and Vaughan have been continuously looking for other processes they can speed up and automate through Activate. For example, the HR department wanted to automate the process for staff to sign the ‘conflict of interest declaration’ form.

“Getting staff and managers to sign the document and send it back was a nightmare and the process was hard to track. We worked the entire process into Activate and customised an online form by linking Activate’s workflow engine with our people information from Active Directory. Now, with the click of a button, managers can fill in the form and send it off to HR. The status of each document can be easily seen in a report. No more forms are lost in internal mail and no manual chasing of people is required. Activate does it all for them,” said Lisa.

TVNZ has been able to easily integrate Activate into the business and the feedback from managers has been very positive.

As with many of Activate’s customers, TVNZ has realised that Activate not only offers significant business benefits but also enables them to leverage their existing investments in IT systems such as Active Directory and Exchange.

‍Key Outcomes:

• Automated user setup workflows, reducing manual effort and errors
• Improved service centre planning and workload management
• Reduced risk of inappropriate access through more controlled user group management
• Enabled department staff to self-manage email Distribution Lists with clear visibility
• Saved approximately 40 hours weekly on manual system administration
• Automated and streamlined document signing process for HR compliance
• Enhanced tracking and reporting of key workflows and approvals
• Maximised value from existing IT infrastructure investments.