Lake Michigan Regional School Board Uses a SaaS Management Platform to Manage Employee Offboarding and Onboarding

Not so long ago, school districts viewed Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) as a great way to offload email from their servers or to run small pilots. But no more. Today, school boards increasingly see it as a way to deliver services and apps via the cloud directly to the classroom and the front office.

Lake Michigan Regional School Board (LMRSB) is a shining example of an organization enjoying the many benefits of cloud computing.

Now CTO Elizabeth no longer needs her team to download individual applications onto school computers in computer labs, classrooms, and libraries. They give access to specific apps as teachers need them.

While the benefits far outweigh the cons, shes recently identified a significant challenge: the school board employs 445 full-time staff and another 315 temporary employees.

Most LMRSB staff begin in some sort of temporary status—on an intern permit, short-term staff permit, or as a long-term substitute or temporary teacher. While some continue onto full-time positions, others don’t.

For Elizabeth, this means that she’s faced with the daunting task of continually offboarding and onboarding people.

The Importance of Managing a Users’ Onboarding and Offboarding

Properly managing users’ offboarding and shutting down the accounts of departing employees is one of the most tedious yet crucial tasks of LMRSB’s IT department.

It includes figuring out what apps the employees have signed up for and used, what access permissions you must revoke, and what company data resides in these apps.

For LMRSB’s IT staff, employee offboarding was a manual process. They had to reach out to app owners individually and ensure each account was closed.

Elizabeth was also aware that effectively onboarding employees is critical to the school board. It helps build culture and happy staff, but it also lessens the risk of future security and compliance issues.

Across the board’s 315 temporary staff, it quickly becomes a nightmare to manage the constant onboarding and offboarding. That’s why Elizabeth decided she needed a way to automate the process to ensure peace of mind. It’s how she came across a SaaS management platform.

SaaS Management Platforms Provides Peace of Mind

With a SaaS management platform, Elizabeth was able to quickly automate the SaaS provisioning, de-provisioning, and approval process.

For one, it’s created a faster, more comprehensive onboarding process for temporary staff that enables productivity.

Secondly, she’s now confident that she won’t miss any onboarding or offboarding steps that will leave the school board’s backdoor open.

Finally, she no longer worries about paying for unused licenses or exposing the organization to security and compliance risks.