Smart Cards Speed Up Just-in-Time Provisioning

Jimmy LutzIdentity & Access Management, Offerings, Problem Solved, Technical TipsLeave a Comment

A large government organization hosts a common services platform for thousands of users. Their user provisioning process required manual intervention, which took time and was susceptible to error. With hundreds of thousands of users, this time and exposure to error added up. Our team optimized the user provisioning process by designing and implementing a just-in-time (JIT) provisioning solution. However, instead of relying on SSO and SAML assertions, our solution grabs the required information from the user’s two-factor authentication source, their smart card. In this way, users are automatically provisioned to the web applications as they attempt to access them, instead … Read More

The Sales Reports You Want vs The Sales Reports You Get (video)

Jimmy LutzBig Data & BI, Offerings, Problem Solved, SalesforceLeave a Comment

Leadership at a large media and entertainment company with over 2,500 sales-focused users was receiving standard sales reports through Salesforce. Managers could not easily view data for each user in the same format as the rolled-up reports, and individual users could not see their own data the way their manager could. This meant that there was a constant disconnect between how leadership managed the business and how individual contributors tracked their own results. The popular business intelligence tools oversimplify the data or create basic dashboards, which did not meet the client’s needs. Working closely with our client, we developed a … Read More

VPN Upgrade Reduces Hospital’s Hassle

Jimmy LutzBusiness Strategy, Cloud and Virtualization, Problem Solved, Technical TipsLeave a Comment

The healthcare division of a Fortune 500 company provides data processing services to its hospital clients. They use an IPsec VPN to transport data between the client and their cloud-hosted web application platform. Security and HIPAA compliance are obviously very important. Originally, our client used the VPN offered by the cloud service provider, but they were concerned about limitations in traffic visibility and the inability to locally initiate a tunnel. The final straw came when a new hospital client required the use of Internet Key Exchange v2 (IKEv2) protocol. Our team was able to use an open-source solution to replace … Read More

Business Intelligence Hampered by a Lack of Clear Role Management

Jimmy LutzBig Data & BI, Business Strategy, Cloud and Virtualization, Higher Education, Identity & Access Management, Industry Trends, Problem SolvedLeave a Comment

A top 70 national university uses an enterprise-level solution to report on important university-wide research data and business intelligence. Access to this data is managed by roles across a multitude of schools within the university, but the lack of role management across the university was limiting access and use. To complicate things, the various stakeholders were initially reluctant to adopt a university-wide role framework or standard policy for provisioning and de-provisioning. In short: identity and access management (IAM) were inefficient and disjointed. Our team developed and implemented a phased approach to implement role-based access control (RBAC) framework to upgrade its … Read More

Nonprofit Supporting Survivors of Human Trafficking Gains New Clarity from Salesforce Implementation

Jimmy LutzBig Data & BI, Problem Solved, SalesforceLeave a Comment

Supporting Survivors of Human Tafficking

An East Coast-based nonprofit organization tracked all their interactions with donors and people in need using an antiquated web page, which made reporting nearly impossible. They also needed a better way to track employee hours, volunteer hours, and services provided to those in need. Finally, they needed a way to gain visibility into how to improve their services. Our team volunteered to customize the Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack to better suit the needs of the nonprofit. We provided a comprehensive reporting system, time tracking with approvals and a way to show how they support their clients over the years with … Read More

Enabling University Students to Share Experiences From Outside the Classroom

Jimmy LutzBig Data & BI, Higher Education, Problem Solved, SalesforceLeave a Comment

How do you help students share their experiences

Universities strive to build strong connections with every student and deliver an unparalleled education that combines classroom learning with real-world experiences and self-discovery. Our client, a top 50 liberal arts university, embarked on a project to meet this need with a new hybrid program. Their plan was to use Salesforce to track the many interactions that students had with mentors and faculty, as well as to provide a platform for reflecting on experiences and opportunities that happened outside the classroom. Efforts prior to our involvement resulted in fundamental challenges, including difficult navigation, limited reporting capabilities, and a lack of alignment … Read More

Monitoring Employee Productivity and Welfare

Jimmy LutzBig Data & BI, Business Strategy, Problem Solved, SalesforceLeave a Comment

reporting on employee well-being

During normal operations, a mid-sized consulting firm needs to track and report on several different parameters regarding their employees. The disparate data on employees reside in several different systems, making access, and review a time-consuming process. As the COVID-19 event unfolds, the company’s managers find themselves needing more data points for evaluating and monitoring employee productivity, morale, and efficiency. Several new fields are added to the various systems, many of which will remain after the pandemic is resolved. While this provided useful data points, it exacerbated the challenge of having multiple systems. Using a tool that we created, our team … Read More