Automating the System Authorization Access Request (DD Form 2875) with Kinetic Data

Hi, my name is James Davies with Kinetic Data. I’m here today to give an overview of the Kinetic Platform and how it can be used to automate the DoD 2875 process.

On today’s call, I’m going to give a brief overview of the Kinetic Platform and then dive into a live demo of how we can apply the Kinetic Platform to the DoD 2875 process.

Kinetic Platform is an enterprise workflow platform with a primary focus, providing intuitive and flexible digital experiences that streamline organization’s most complex business processes. With Kinetic, enterprise organizations can preserve their existing investment and enhance the user experience without the need to customize their current tools and systems of record.

We provide the ability to create end-user interfaces that can be used by both requesters who need something, for instance, access to a system and also to fulfill orders who may be doing an approval or completing a task as part of the overall process. Within any step of that process, our workflow backend can push and pull data from various systems of record, providing a great user experience and also removing the need for fillers to swivel chair between multiple systems.

Additionally, our customers can typically reduce licensing costs for their current backend fulfillment systems by moving parts of the process that have a very large user community into the Kinetic Platform itself.

As a side note, our business model includes a no-name user license guarantee. This means that our customers don’t need to worry about the number of users interacting with Kinetic affecting their bill.

Let’s jump in now to a brief overview of the Kinetic Platform. We’re going to split this up into front end and backends. We’ll start with front ends and talk about the key components that make up front ends within Kinetic portals.

The first portals provide an interface for end users to be able to interact with the actual Kinetic application. The portal you’re seeing on the screen is an example portal that someone on the fulfillment side might work in, either completing an approval or a work order within Kinetic. You can also have portals that are end user facing, making it easy for users to locate forms in the portals intuitive interface.

The next key component of the Kinetic front ends are forms. Forms are where end users can input data that will eventually be passed into a workflow. forms can be configured by your current support team in our low code Form Builder. Additionally, forms can source data from external systems to auto populate fields and drop down lists.

Another key component of Kinetic front ends is the ability to see the status of a workflow that was executed against the form. There are various ways to configure the status page layout. The one shown here is a timeline view that is displaying information on each step of the process. The status pages are highly configurable, and can also be configured to look up data in real time and various back end systems and databases.

Let’s move on now to the back end of the platform and start with integrations. The Kinetic Platform provides a robust integration framework that allows builders to configure various integrations within a workflow. Kinetic has over 400 pre-built integrations that can be easily imported into the system and are publicly available.

Customers can also build their own integrations for usage within workflows. For instance, an integration with the DoD real time broker service, or the Army’s enterprise access management service.

Workflows are arguably one of the most important components of the Kinetic Platform. Workflows are easily configurable in our drag and drop workflow builder, which resembles a Visio diagram. Each step of a workflow process can either interact with the Kinetic Platform itself to create or update a record, or can be configured to call an integration.

The workflow builder provides a simple way to build decision logic and map parameters into various steps. Robots are the final component of the Kinetic Platform’s back end, there are automations that can be configured to run on a given time interval, like every five minutes once a day or every other month. Robots provide a way to reduce human error and improve speed and quality similar to a robotic process automation or RPA tool. Robots can also easily be configured to do automated polling, to keep various systems in sync with each other, or to keep other systems in sync with the Kinetic Platform itself.

Let’s now move on to a live demo where we can apply what we just learned about the Kinetic Platform to the DoD is system access an authorization request, otherwise known as the 2875. What you’re seeing here is an example form built using our low code Form Builder.

This form is being displayed within a portal that allows users to navigate to the desired request and fill it out. We’ve configured the system to display the form in a paper layout very close to what the actual 2875 form looks like. These layouts are highly configurable, and can accommodate any design. As you can see, we’re on the first step of the 2875. And the user is only presented with the fields that need to be filled out.

Within our form builder, your team can easily configure which fields are required and when based on any imaginable logic. drop down lists and select venues can also be defined within the Kinetic Platform, or pull data dynamically in real time from systems of record, which will help users improve speed and reduce the likelihood of rejection or having the request set back for correction. I’ll finish populating the form with some dummy data, and then sign it to submit for execution.

Digital signatures can also be captured within forms. In this example, a digital signature widget has been added to the form to allow the user to sign with their mouse or with their finger on a tablet or smartphone.

There are also other ways to do digital signatures within the platform, like grabbing information off the user’s CatCard and storing it with the request when the form is submitted. At this point, the form is ready for completion. When the user hits submit, all of the data that was captured in the form will be passed into a workflow and route it to the appropriate teams for approval.

Immediately after submission, the user is directed to an activity page that shows all of the different workflow steps that have been configured to be shown to the end user. I see here that the form has been received. And now that the supervisor approval has been created and assigned to the supervisors team. As I mentioned earlier, this screen is also very highly configurable. Different types of data can be displayed based on the event that took place in the workflow and exposed to the end user.

At this point, I’m going to switch gears and pretend to be an approver. I’ll navigate to another area of the portal where tasks and approvals assigned to me or my team are displayed. This is a consolidated view of all actions that are pending my input.

I’ll now choose the supervisor’s team. And you can see here that a supervisor approval or part two of the 2875 appears, I can click into it and see all of the details and fields that were submitted on the original request, then I can grab it, which assigns it to myself and work it on this page, you can see a read only view of the original part of the 2875 form that was submitted by the requester.

We can also make this editable if needed for your use case. As an approver, I’m going to go ahead and click on Approve and continue. And then I’ll be presented with part two, which requires the justification for access and other information that’s needed for the fulfillment process. Eventually, just like the first form, I’ll sign off as the manager and approve this request.

As you can see, this request is now completed. And as an approver, I can go through and actually see all of my approved requests. I’m going to take a minute here to show you some other functionality of our queuing system.

I can add something called a discussion to an approval to gather more information about the request that was assigned to me. I can create a new discussion, save it, and then enter into it and invite folks that might be required to help make my approval decision.

Here I’m inviting one of the other managers to ensure that this person has access to this request. One key thing about discussions is that they’re linked to the actual task that’s assigned to me. So record retroactively, I can go back, and I can see what happened during this approval step.

Over time, this gives you a way to reflect on your process and continuously improve it by looking through the discussions and seeing if there’s additional information that maybe could have been captured or automated as part of your workflow.

I’ll now move on to the next step of the process, which is the information owner approval. I happen to be in all of the groups and be and be the one that all of the approvals are assigned to for demo purposes. But you can see here that the next step has been created. I can see all of the data captured in the previous steps. And just like before, go in and work and approve.

With this part of the process, I’ll go ahead and sign off and continue. The next few steps here are just repeats of this one, the approver or approving team will get assigned the subsequent step and navigate in to complete it. Email Notifications can also be sent out along the way to notify folks of approval that’s assigned to them.

I’ve arrived here at the last step of the forum process that we’ve built out. It’s the security manager approval. Here, the security manager will look up clearance information in the Defense Information System for security or dis. There’s a potential here to also build out additional integrations with that system to automate this, check speed, improve quality, and for the security manager to perform other work.

At this point, the request is now complete. And the process will now take all of the data that was captured here and submit it into ServiceNow.

To create a change ticket that will be assigned to someone to actually grant this access. As a requester, I can go back to my requests, I can see the completed 2875 form. And when I click into it, I can see the discussion that was created earlier in the process. I can also see all of the steps who approved them when they were approved. And then finally I can see the change record that was created in the ServiceNow system.

Now copy that change ID navigate to ServiceNow. Search for that change. And as you can see here, the change has been created. All of the details have been dumped into the description so that the fulfiller has the information they need to complete their task. And additionally, a PDF version of the 2875 fully completed and signed is attached to your in a note.

Keep in mind that in this case, we integrated with ServiceNow for fulfillment, but Kinetic is completely agnostic of the back end. We can integrate with systems like BMC Remedy, and Avanti and various other back end systems to create fulfillment records for your team.

Let’s switch gears now and take a look at the actual workflow that was executed. Right here at the start, we’re getting all of the information that was captured from the original requester. Next, we’re sending an email notification out to the requester letting them know that the request has been received and giving them a confirmation number and then attaching an SLA to ensure that the process gets completed on time.

Along the way, anyone that’s assigned an approval will get reminded if the overall process has not been completed in time or is about to expire. We can also configure SLAs on a per approval basis. So let’s say Part Two requires two days to be completed, and they can get notifications just for that part.

As you can see here, there’s a decision tree. And as the different steps of the process get approved, it flows down to the next step. Otherwise, it takes the denied path out and sends the user a notification of why it was denied and asks them to resubmit. Again, this workflow can be tailored pretty heavily to allow the request to be sent back to the original requester to follow this flow again. Eventually, all the data that was captured and the approval steps and the original request are merged together, and we create the ServiceNow ticket.

If I click enter into an individual node, you’ll see that it’s just a simple mapping exercise to pass the data that’s required to perform that step in this logic can easily be changed by your team by clicking into any of the decision trees and modifying the logic that allows it to continue on to the next step in a very low code fashion. Next, let’s navigate over to the form builder so you can see what it looks like to build a form.

Over on the left hand side there’s a set of elements that I can drag over onto the page to add a new field. I can also click into a field to change if it’s required, if it’s visible, or if it’s conditionally required.

Well, that wraps up our overview of the DoD is 2875 process. On behalf of all of us at Kinetic Data, I’d like to thank you for your time and also know that we’re here to help so feel free to reach out to us via email using sales@kineticdata.com by commenting on the video or by contacting one of the many systems integrators we work with.