Innovation Highlight: Skillsoft (LMS) License Deprovisioning

Nominated for: Peak Academy Awards, Best Team Innovation Category

Agency: Technology Services and Human Resources

Team: Jay Rathbun, Marla Trevor, Gio Thomas

Why Change Was Needed/Problem: Skillsoft Learning Management System (LMS), the foundation of CityU, user deprovisioning was not working correctly. The process set in place by the vendor did not accurately deactivate licenses, which resulted in the city paying for active licenses that were tied to former employees who no longer work for the City. The process to deprovision an account was very manual, time consuming, and hard to keep up with and the process set in place by the vendor had a cost associated with making any changes. The team decided to work on a custom solution to avoid incurring additional cost from the vendor. The system was also difficult to report out of, as users were reflected in reports that should not be, which required a lot of manual work to remove and recalculate statistics.

Innovation: The team created an integration with the City Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system to export a batch upload file of all employees terminated since the previous run. This file is run monthly in the LMS to deprovision the accounts. The count of active users in the LMS was compared to the count of active users in the ERP to ensure the process worked correctly.

Benefits: Nearly $23,000 in unnecessary licensing costs for Skillsoft LMS

Q&A with Jay Rathbun

What about your innovation are you most proud of? One of the best parts of working on this innovation was working with the team. It truly highlights the impact employees who are working with the issues every day can do when empowered to look for improvements.

What is the biggest lesson you learned for future innovations? The key to really truly understanding a problem at hand is to actively listen. Marla and I were working on a different issue entirely, but by asking targeted questions and actively listening to the issues end users were facing, we were able to identify the opportunity for this innovation.

What advice do you have for other innovators or people seeking to innovate? Never underestimate the impact your ideas can have on the city. Be willing to put your idea out in the open with your peers and leadership teams. Just a few hours of work can result in huge savings once you learn about a problem!

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