How to Achieve Zero-Touch IT With Google Forms and BetterCloud

I love Google Forms and Google Sheets. Maybe a bit too much.

Need to order the whole company swag? Send out a form. Need to collect quick feedback on how to improve something? Out goes another form. Need a standardized way to get required new hire information from HR to IT? You guessed it: Do it with a form. 

While the dream state is a zero-touch integration between your HRIS and identity provider, perhaps sometimes the integration you need doesn’t exist. In other cases, the project might be large or expensive and all you have access to is your collaboration suite and SaaSOps tool of choice? To Google Forms we go!

When I was a product manager, I learned that the key to building tools and processes is to start small. You can (and should) aspire and diagram for the best solution, but you’ll probably need to build the smallest piece of it today in order to see if you can solve a problem tomorrow, fully knowing you will be getting user feedback and data to improve it later. 

Achieving zero-touch automation between the HR team and the IT’s onboarding process using a Google Form to trigger a BetterCloud onboarding workflow is exactly that: A lightweight but powerful way to realize all of that sweet time savings and get your team’s time back to do more strategic work (or chill on a beach)!

The challenge

Before we get into the mechanics of how BetterCloud and Google Forms work together, we should talk about why it matters.

IT teams are losing hours every week to what can be considered very manual onboarding tasks clicking around the admin panels of SaaS applications. One of BetterCloud’s biggest customers reported they would spend approximately 2,678 hours on SaaS onboarding alone. Having automated workflows to create users, assign to groups and roles, provision licenses, and grant access to assets, projects, drives, calendars, and more show a clear path to time savings.

For those who are having HR and/or hiring managers filling out Google Forms upon hiring a new teammate, their process looks like the diagram below.

Why does the help desk need to read a form and click into admin consoles to provision these accounts? All team members would agree that time can be put towards more meaningful activities like deciding which margarita flavor to get at the beach.

The solution

BetterCloud’s Extended Triggers can read an incoming Google Form’s data and map its fields to an automated onboarding workflow. From email addresses, organizational fields, names, addresses, phone numbers, to all other required people data to create and organize SaaS users in your identity system, collaboration suites, video conferencing, and any of our 70+ native integrations – BetterCloud maps your form inputs to your SaaS’s Public APIs for user management. 

As a plus, BetterCloud can also send emails or Slack messages to your people team and hiring managers to keep them informed or request access approvals for your new hire. 

The demo

Watch the demo below for a step-by-step walkthrough of configuring Google Forms and BetterCloud.

Resources

Want to start achieving your zero-touch onboarding with Google Forms and BetterCloud? Here’s a Google Forms template and AppsScript (Password is ADd9kEu8Di) to get started!