Case Study: Government Body Chooses ITSM for Processes, Activate for Workforce Lifecycle Automation
Why This Government Organisation Moved Automated Identity Work Out of a Major ITSM Platform
A government organisation needed a more effective way to manage workforce lifecycle provisioning, reduce manual effort, and improve operational resilience. The ITSM platform was being used for HR pre-hire processes, incident management, and change management, but onboarding, role changes, and offboarding still relied on forms, multiple tickets, and manual processing across resolver groups. That created unnecessary workload for IT and service desk teams and limited the organisation’s ability to automate identity-driven services efficiently.
The challenge with manual workforce lifecycle provisioning
In preparation for a major national event in 2023, the organisation reviewed how to improve workforce lifecycle automation, including onboarding, role changes, and eventual offboarding. The existing ITSM-led model supported workflow visibility, but not the level of automated identity provisioning needed to reduce manual effort and lower the risk of human error during complex provisioning tasks.
Why the organisation chose Activate over expanding ITSM automation
Following a formal business case, the organisation selected Activate’s Identity Lifecycle solution as the preferred platform and partner for identity lifecycle automation. The decision was driven by lower cost of ownership, stronger automation capability, and a proven delivery track record. It was also unable to obtain clear implementation cost estimates or evidence from their ITSM platform for the level of automation required.
How Activate improved government workforce lifecycle automation
We implemented our Identity Lifecycle solution in time for the 2023 operational period. This gave the organisation a more reliable model for government identity automation, helping reduce the burden on internal IT teams while improving consistency across identity provisioning tasks. Over time, more services that could be provisioned automatically were moved from the major ITSM platform into Activate, with cost and time to delivery becoming major factors in that shift.
The outcome: fewer ITSM tickets and more automated provisioning
During the 2023 period, Activate Identity Lifecycle reduced the number of required ITSM tickets by approximately 52.3%, reducing total workload on IT and service desk teams. Today, Activate manages automated lifecycle provisioning, contractor onboarding, identity and entitlement management, and privileged account management for sensitive and vendor accounts, while the ITSM platform remains focused on HR pre-hire processes, incidents, and changes.
Identity automation ROI for government organisations
Activate Identity Lifecycle is currently processing over 50,000 automated provisioning requests per year across approximately 2,000 users, with that number expected to grow as more service requests and tasks move into Activate. This case shows how government identity automation can improve ROI by reducing ticket volume, lowering manual effort, improving delivery speed, and giving organisations a more scalable way to manage workforce lifecycle provisioning.
The bottom line
For this government organisation, the key to better outcomes was separating workflow management from identity execution. The major ITSM platform continued to manage operational workflows, while Activate handled the identity lifecycle automation needed to run onboarding, role changes, offboarding, contractor onboarding, and privileged access processes accurately and at scale.