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08/07/2026 6:53 pm
TL;DR: Access reviews can complete on schedule while still producing approvals based on assumption, because managers are often asked to certify entitlements they cannot understand or risk-rate, according to OpenIAM. The governance gap is not review volume but decision quality: if access is not legible, certification becomes paperwork, not control.
NHIMG editorial — based on content published by OpenIAM: Why Managers Approve Access They Don't Understand During Access Reviews
Questions worth separating out
Q: How should organisations make access reviews more reliable?
A: They should make access legible before asking managers to certify it.
Q: Why do managers approve access they do not understand?
A: Managers usually approve because the review process gives them too little context to make a confident decision.
Q: What breaks when access review decisions lack context?
A: The certification loses its value as evidence of control.
Practitioner guidance
- Expose business meaning in the review queue Rewrite entitlement labels so managers see what the access actually enables, which data or application it touches, and the business function it supports before certification begins.
- Attach ownership and purpose to every certification item Require each access item to show who approved it, why it was granted, and whether that purpose is still active, so reviewers can revoke stale access instead of guessing.
- Surface risk signals inside the workflow Flag privileged, regulated, temporary, and exception-based access directly in the review interface so managers can focus scrutiny where the impact of a wrong approval is highest.
What's in the full article
OpenIAM's full article covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- The specific access review failure patterns that produce assumption-based approvals in real programmes
- The review-stage signals that help managers distinguish understandable access from opaque entitlements
- The governance logic behind simplifying user access reviews without reducing decision quality
- The practical framing OpenIAM uses to connect certification design to identity governance outcomes
👉 Read OpenIAM's analysis of why managers approve access they do not understand →
Access reviews without context: why are approvals still passing?
Explore further
08/07/2026 7:15 pm
Access reviews fail when entitlement legibility is treated as optional. Governance frameworks assume reviewers can understand the access they are certifying, but most enterprise catalogues present technical labels rather than business meaning. That breaks decision quality before the review even begins. The implication is that access certification is only as trustworthy as the information model behind it.
A few things that frame the scale:
- 88.5% of organisations acknowledge that their non-human IAM practices lag behind or are merely on par with their human identity and access management efforts, according to The 2024 Non-Human Identity Security Report.
- Only 19.6% of security professionals express strong confidence in their organisation's ability to securely manage non-human workload identities.
A question worth separating out:
Q: Who is accountable when access is certified without understanding?
A: Accountability remains shared, but the strongest failure is usually in the governance design, not the manager alone. IAM and IGA teams are responsible for making entitlements understandable, owners visible, and risk obvious. Managers can only certify what they can interpret, so unreadable reviews are a programme design problem first.
👉 Read our full editorial: Access review decision quality is failing enterprise governance
