Novell Identity Manager at Maudsley

South London and the Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust is using Novell Identity Manager to manage the user accounts of more than 8,000 staff.

NHS Connecting for Health has an enterprise licence agreement in place for Novell Identity Manager, but the trust worked with Salford Software on the implementation.

The system collects data from the NHS Electronic Staff record and uses it to populate the trust’s Microsoft Active Directory, which controls user access rights for its systems.

Any changes to staff status in the ESR are therefore automatically reflected in the Active Directory permissions. In some areas, such as pharmacy stock control, Novell Identity Manager also managers single sign-on so staff do not have to sign-into multiple applications.

Chris Irving, the trust’s IT service manager, said creating, changing and removing user accounts used to involve hand-written forms being faxed to its IT department – a process that was “slow” and “fraught with error.”

“With Novel Identity Manager, we have reduced the time to provision a new user from two days to just four hours,” he said. “Requiring users to remember only one set of credentials for accessing applications has also improved end-user satisfaction and productivity and reduced password related calls to the service desk.

“We will introduce password self-service capabilities that will further cut down the number of service desk calls and are planning to extend single sign-on to more applications.”

South London and the Maudsley has to create, change or disable around 200 accounts every month.

Links: Novell

Salford Software