Submitted by indraraj.wso2.com on Wed, 12/04/2024 - 00:55
User Management and Self-Service
Ensure the consumers, business customers, and employees who need access to your organization’s resources are properly onboarded, provisioned, and empowered.
Streamline administrative effort and accelerate the time to productivity for your users.
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What Are User Management and User Self-Service?
In identity and access management (IAM) systems, user management and self-service are crucial components that streamline user onboarding, provisioning, and access management processes. They enhance security, efficiency, and user experience, for both internal workforce and external consumer users.
User Management
User management focuses on properly setting up users within the IAM system so that they can access the organization’s resources.
Onboarding may involve simply creating a user account and assigning permissions, or go further by adding detailed user attributes, preferences, role memberships, and more.
In internal workforce settings, onboarding is usually handled centrally by an administrator or through automated processes. In external customer situations, individual users typically onboard themselves by signing up and creating their account.
User Self-Service
User self-service enables users to manage their own profiles and preferences. These actions are usually done through a self-service portal, where users can update their account information, change their password, configure privacy consent settings, enroll in multi-factor authentication (MFA), and more.
Benefits of User Management and User Self-Service
For Organizations
Effective user management is essential for smooth system operations and security.
A streamlined onboarding process can quickly and cost-effectively set up new users, while well-organized user management prevents issues like orphaned accounts and incorrect permissions or preferences, which can lead to security risks and compliance problems.
Self-service features can further improve efficiency by empowering users to manage common tasks like resetting passwords or updating profiles and preferences.
In external consumer-facing applications, user sign-up and onboarding processes must be intuitive and simple. A well-designed onboarding process reduces the friction that often leads to users abandoning the sign-up process out of frustration.
For Users
Effective user management streamlines the process of granting users access to the resources they need. Self-service capabilities further empower users to manage their own accounts, reducing reliance on IT support.
For internal users, this accelerates their onboarding and productivity. In external customer settings, it ensures a seamless user experience, minimizing friction and maximizing engagement.
How Do User Management and Self-Service Work?
Administrator-Led User Management
The process of onboarding users can be initiated and managed by an IT administrator, either singly or in a bulk process. Some of the administrator’s key user management tasks:
- Add new users to the system and manage their profiles
- Assign users to groups
- Create and manage user groups and roles
- Define privileges/permissions for the roles
- Provision users to external applications and systems
- Link multiple accounts belonging to the user and centrally manage them
- View and manage current user sessions
Self-Service Portal
User self-service actions are typically handled through a user portal. End users can perform self care actions such as:
- Configure, manage, and reset their passwords
- Updating their user profiles
- Set up account recovery information
- Enroll in multi-factor authentication methods
- Configure passwordless login
- View, revoke, or edit consent given to apps registered in the system
- Use social accounts to log into the system
- Link multiple accounts together to they can be managed as one
Automated Onboarding
Especially in internal workforce scenarios, users are initially set up and managed within a human resource database. This can trigger automatic processes which provision application accounts and assign permissions.
Consent and Preference Management
Especially for external customer accounts, it’s critical to collect and manage user consent for privacy related matters, which are governed by regulations such as GDPR and CCPA.
Progressive Profiling
Progressive profiling allows organizations to build up external customer profile information over time, instead of all up-front, minimizing the inconvenience factor that can drive users away.
Provisioning
Once users are onboarded, user provisioning lets organizations grant them access to their services and resources via a rule-based automation system.
