$2.5 Million Dollars A Year

If you've only read the last two posts, you might think that Role Model Analysis does not work. It does, it saved one of our clients $2.5 million a year in lost productivity. While the majority of our clients were satisfied with their role models and could point to reductions in effort and improvements in security (as measured in fewer work items and more focus on irregular access), putting actual dollar values on the savings an optimized IAM system can generate is more difficult. Sometimes you get lucky though.



The client was a large regional healthcare provider with multiple hospitals and a staff that was supplemented by a large, and constantly changing, contingent of traveling nurses. Assuming you're familiar with the basics of Identity and Access Management, you already know that high turnover can drastically increase the count of access requests and provisioning tasks that IT needs to action. Unless you're privy to the cost of the personnel performing the tasks this turnover generates and know how long each task takes, you might not know exactly how much this turnover can be costing you.

The IAM Team was acutely aware of how much the turnover in access was costing its employer. The traveling nurses were blocked from performing their tasks for a week after their start dates due to delays and errors in requesting and provisioning access. The bosses were not happy. The dollar figure of this cost was put in front of the IAM team; it came directly from the contracting office that knew exactly what 1 week of a traveling nurse cost (it's a lot, traveling medical professionals are expensive). To be fair to the IAM team, this problem wasn't the result of their work; it existed before there even was an IAM team, they inherited it, as is true of all newly stood-up IAM teams.

Thankfully for them, the solution wasn't particularly expensive or time-consuming. This project was several years into our practice, and the efforts had become routine and streamlined. Three months and less than $200,000 later, a handful of roles was putting newly arrived nurses to work on day one. Turning $200,000 (circa 2022) into a $2.5M a year ROI is what a good RBAC program can do.