National Retailer Chooses ITSM for Operations, Activate for Identity Automation.
Why This Retail Organisation Moved a Major ITSM Platform and Kept Activate for Higher-Value Automation
A large retail organisation needed a scalable way to manage identity lifecycle services across a high-volume user environment. Long before changing its ITSM platform, it was already using Activate to automate onboarding and offboarding, application access, distribution lists, secure folders, shared mailboxes, password reset, licence management, and wider user lifecycle processes. Extending to the full Activate Identity Operations solution enabled them to integrate with HR data to support automated provisioning based on department, location, and business area, giving the organisation a strong foundation for retail identity automation at scale.
The challenge with moving complex identity work into ITSM
When the organisation replaced its legacy ITSM platform, the plan was to make it the main user portal and gradually move request management across. Simple requests were expected to move first, followed by more complex identity-driven services. In practice, that shift proved difficult. Automated onboarding and offboarding could not be implemented to the same extent, and key service areas such as computer asset management did not deliver as expected.
Why Activate remained central to identity lifecycle automation
As the programme progressed, the organisation found that many of its most important identity and access services still needed to remain in Activate. These included onboarding and offboarding, access to distribution lists, secure folders, shared mailboxes, password reset, Office 365 management, and application access retained to support automated offboarding. The project also ran out of development budget before complex service requests could be migrated, reinforcing the value of keeping specialist identity automation in the platform already built to execute it.
Cost, delivery, and support shaped the decision
The organisation reviewed the cost, benefit, and value of its ITSM toolset and concluded that the major ITSM platform was expensive across licensing, project delivery, and support. Delivery continuity also became a challenge, with multiple implementation partners involved over time and offshore product support making it harder to get the right assistance. This made the ROI case for retaining Activate’s Identity Operations solution even clearer, particularly for high-volume automated provisioning and identity lifecycle management.
The outcome: separating workflow management from identity execution
The organisation ultimately chose a clearer operating model. Incidents and change management moved into Jira Service Management, while all automated provisioning requests were shifted back into Activate. Activate was then integrated with JSM, with direct links provided for automated requests. This created a more efficient co-existence model in which operational service workflows were managed in one platform, while identity execution remained in the platform best suited to automate it.
The ROI of retail identity automation
Today, Activate processes more than 107,000 automated provisioning requests annually across approximately 11,700 users in this environment. This case shows how retail organisations can improve identity automation ROI by reducing the cost of manual fulfilment, avoiding expensive redevelopment of complex workflows, and keeping identity services running in a platform designed for automated execution at scale.
The bottom line
For this large retail organisation, the value came from recognising that ITSM and identity automation do different jobs. The major ITSM platform was intended to manage work, but Activate remained the platform for executing identity work across systems. That distinction helped the organisation protect automation value, improve delivery outcomes, and support high-volume identity lifecycle management more effectively.