Democratising Innovation: Okta Workflows Now Available for Customer Identity

Despite the immense challenges of 2020, we saw some incredible work across our customer base over this past year. These bright spots include COVID-19 responses in healthcare, educational institutions finding creative ways to help students learn, and small businesses engaging with their local communities in meaningful ways. In all of these cases, it wasn’t just remote work that accelerated: innovation moved faster than ever with businesses creating new or broadened digital footprints to meet both consumers and workers wherever they are. 

Today at Oktane21, we’re making it even easier to deliver innovative solutions with identity at the heart of seamless digital experiences. We’re thrilled to announce that Okta Workflows for Customer Identity is now generally available to help admins, architects, and developers streamline digital transformation with automation, and ultimately better manage customer lifecycles, data privacy, administrative operations, and more. We’re also excited to unveil a new feature for all Workflows builders, Okta Workflows templates, to make it easier to get started with a pre-built set of sample flows, all vetted by Okta experts.

Low-code/no-code automation speeds innovation

Low-code/no-code automation has been a driving force for change. The proliferation of APIs and open software platforms has significantly opened the doors for digital innovation, and low-code/no-code platforms enable anyone—with or without extensive coding skills—to harness its potential.

At the same time, identity is more fragmented and complex than ever before with more users accessing even more systems. Managing all of these tools and keeping them in sync is a monumental challenge.

The Okta Workflows platform service sits at the intersection of these two trends, harnessing the proliferation of APIs to automate identity-based actions. By replacing complex custom code and scripts with user-friendly flows and connectors, Workflows enables anyone to innovate. Workflows builders can use a series of intuitive if-this-then-that conditional logic statements to call APIs and build enhanced omni-channel experiences for end users. 

Powering identity automation use cases for customer applications

Last year, we launched Workflows for Lifecycle Management to help manage user lifecycles across mover, joiner, and leaver states. Today, we’re taking the next step to unlock customer identity use cases that will elevate customer experiences and further engage customers. 

Okta Workflows for Customer Identity helps organisations easily integrate identity with existing technology stacks and automate business processes across them, massively reducing manual work and custom code. Customer identity admins, architects, and developers can automate B2B, B2C, and partner business processes with pre-built Workflows connectors, such as Hubspot, Mixpanel, and OneTrust, or by easily connecting to any public API.

Using Workflows, organisations can solve key customer identity use cases through automation, including: 

• Sync customer identities to CRM, marketing tools, and customer data platforms.
• Kick off consent and data privacy workflows with third-party providers like OneTrust.
• Streamline registration, identity creation, and identity proofing.
• Grant and revoke access to business-critical technology, including custom applications.
• Send end-user notifications and create lightweight reports.  
• Replace utility code like lightweight data transformation or filtering with a workflow.

By replacing one-off code and scripts with a highly available, reliable solution, Workflows makes innovation more accessible for all. Organisations can focus their resources wisely, drive faster time-to-value, and ultimately deliver elevated solutions that are easy to maintain and sustain for the long term. Developers can reduce time spent reading over API documentation and building out integrations, or simply replace mundane custom scripts—like lightweight data transformation or filtering—with a workflow. Finally, customers can enjoy frictionless, highly personalised experiences with peace of mind that their personal data is secure.

New playbooks for success: Okta Workflows templates

Today, Workflows unlocks countless opportunities to drive innovation and automate critical identity-based processes across Customer Identity and Lifecycle Management use cases. To make it easier to get started and learn best practices for popular use cases, we’re excited to launch new Okta Workflows templates. These templates allow flow builders to explore, download, and customise example flows that have been vetted by Okta experts.

Okta Workflows templates set a foundation for community best practices, delivering predefined templates as simple plug-and-play solutions as well as inspirational and educational content to help flow builders do more with Workflows. We’ll continue to add more templates throughout the year, working with our own internal experts, partners, and power builders from across the Workflows community to contribute templates, insights, and best practices—stay tuned! If you have a template you’d like to contribute, reach out to the Workflows team.

Ready to get started? 

With increasing opportunities to harness innovation and progress, Okta Workflows is the automation engine needed to drive new digital experiences, and we’re thrilled that Okta Workflows for Customer Identity and Okta Workflows templates are generally available today.

For more information, watch our Oktane21 product demo below, reach out to your customer success manager or Okta account representative, or contact us with questions.