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08/06/2026 4:29 pm
TL;DR: Gartner says 80% of CIOs now report to business leaders demanding visible results, and teams that can prove IT value secure 60% more funding, while invisible lifecycle work can consume 30% to 40% of capacity. The real productivity test is whether identity lifecycle automation removes manual access work without creating new governance blind spots.
NHIMG editorial — based on content published by Lumos: How to Boost IT Productivity: Strategies, Metrics, and Common Pitfalls
By the numbers:
- 80% of CIOs now report to business leaders demanding visible results.
- CIOs who can effectively demonstrate the business value of IT secure 60% more funding than those who cannot.
Questions worth separating out
Q: How should teams measure IT productivity in identity lifecycle programmes?
A: Use measures that reflect control and workload together.
Q: Why do manual approvals make lifecycle automation look less effective than it is?
A: Manual approvals distort productivity because they reward activity instead of reducing the work itself.
Q: What breaks when identity lifecycle processes stay fragmented across teams?
A: Fragmentation creates inconsistent provisioning, slow offboarding, duplicate reviews, and unclear accountability.
Practitioner guidance
- Baseline lifecycle work by identity type Separate human accounts, service accounts, and other non-human identities in your productivity measurement so the team can see where manual work is actually concentrated.
- Replace ticket counts with governance metrics Measure deprovisioning lag, entitlement drift, review completion, and access age instead of relying on closure volume or average handle time.
- Map repetitive access changes to policy Move predictable access updates into RBAC or ABAC rules where role and attribute changes can drive entitlement changes automatically.
What's in the full article
Lumos's full blog covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- The specific KPI dashboard template used to track access request time, review cycle time, and licence reclamation across teams
- Examples of how Lumos frames automation coverage for onboarding, mover events, and offboarding in a productivity model
- The vendor's weighted scorecard and outcome heatmap approach for evaluating lifecycle tools
- Implementation details on how Slack and Teams workflows are used to reduce ticket handoffs
👉 Read Lumos's blog on boosting IT productivity with identity lifecycle automation →
Identity lifecycle automation for IT productivity: are your metrics lying?
Explore further
08/06/2026 6:09 pm
Identity productivity is really lifecycle governance in disguise. The article frames automation as an IT efficiency story, but the underlying issue is that access administration still consumes human time because lifecycle processes remain fragmented. When provisioning, review, and deprovisioning are not unified, productivity metrics reward motion instead of control. The practitioner conclusion is simple: if lifecycle governance is weak, productivity reporting will always overstate real progress.
A few things that frame the scale:
- 91.6% of secrets remain valid five days after the targeted organisation is notified, showing a critical gap in remediation procedures, according to Ultimate Guide to NHIs.
- Only 20% have formal processes for offboarding and revoking API keys, and even fewer have procedures for rotating them.
A question worth separating out:
Q: Who should own identity lifecycle automation decisions across IT, security, and HR?
A: Ownership should be shared through a single operating model with clear decision rights. IT may run the workflow, but HR, security, GRC, and application owners all influence lifecycle data and approval logic. Without explicit ownership, automation can speed up inconsistent decisions instead of reducing them.
👉 Read our full editorial: IT productivity and identity lifecycle automation: what changes
