Zanee Insurance Company Limited: Company General Use

Learning Launch

Challenge  As a new employee at my department, in my first few days, I have noticed the abundant number of  access requests that my unit receives on a daily basis. Working as an Information Security Analyst (ISA)  enables me to control system restrictions for users across the company with over 6,000 employees that  need my team’s support to pursue their daily activities. Requests vary in the degree of urgency and  amount of control which usually requires further questioning and deeper justifications from users as  why they need those accesses and for how long. Given the limited number of ISA’s compared to the  demand, this creates a challenge to following up with requests as each request takes approximately 3 to  5 minutes to be closed (in case no further investigation is required which usually takes hours to be  resolved.) and with over 300 requests created daily, ISA’s tend to fall behind and start prioritizing based  on urgency rather than following the flow of requests. An essential part of the challenge is the fact that  the systems we use are scattered between multiple platforms, therefore navigation takes time and  effort which can be resolved by integrating all systems into one platform called MyAccess.

Selection  Our team has already contacted the IT development department that is responsible for all systems we  use. I chose the learning launch approach to try and test the integration of our systems into MyAccess as  we improve and retest based on end-user experience and ISA’s feedback. Learning Launch allows us to  learn more about our needs as we go while saves us the time and energy of a massive launch that could  take longer and interduce more problems due to lack of testing and feedback.

Application  Working closely with the development team, we launched our first prototype focusing on the end-user  ease-of-use and required fields to be filled in order to minimize the effort needed the ISA to approve  and grant accesses. We were able to tweak the system to auto-fill some of the required inputs by  default based on the users’ profiles. For example, ISA is no longer required to check the area of  assignment of each user and grant access accordingly. Instead, the area will be filled-out and does not  require more action.

On our second test, we added restrictions on users based on their roles and areas of assignment as well  as the number of requests created whereas users can apply for multiple roles in one request and are not  allowed to create additional ones until original request has been closed.

The final test launch was more concentrated towards system security and protection. We added a  feature that enables the system to automatically revoke accesses as soon as the user has changed their  area of assignment or/and was no longer within the department. This lowered the load on ISA’s as not  even a glance for approval was required to revoke access and will only be looked at if user has reapplied  for the role through MyAccess system.

Zanee Insurance Company Limited: Company General Use

Insight  Through applying the learning launch design tool, we were able to migrate from our old system to  MyAccess with a full understanding of users needs. Our thinking was powered by user empathy and  problem-solving ideology. This tool allowed a smooth and subtle integration of multiple access-control  systems that used to be entirely separate into one user-friendly, comprehensive and tested platform.  Going through the stages of testing saved us the time that could have been wasted in solving issues that  were not as crucial to the users as the areas that actually needed further attention to be added and  adjusted.

Approach   After the satisfactory outcomes of this challenge and the approach we used, we aspire to keep using  design thinking tools to elevate experiences with our systems and find other areas of improvement that  could be maintained using various ways of design thinking. The learning launch helped us look at our  systems from different perspectives using various user input to enhance and fix as we go. Adapting to  this mind-set encouraged us to look closely at each task and think of an approach to use to better  simplify it and improve. Looking back at our experience with design thinking tool, we might need to  integrate different approaches in order to land on the more appropriate one. Evidently, learning launch  has worked great with our situation but that should not have discouraged us from testing the other  approaches.

