Approval workflows exist to add a human decision point where one is genuinely needed, and in practice most organisations route far more requests through them than that. A manager facing forty routine access requests a week for tools their team already uses is not making forty considered decisions — they're clicking approve as fast as possible because being the reason a colleague can't do their job for three days is worse than the theoretical risk of an ungranted access request slipping through.
The fix is separating requests that genuinely need judgement from ones that don't, and automating the second category entirely. Access to a tool a person's role already implies they need — a sales rep requesting access to the CRM everyone on their team already has — can be granted automatically against a policy rule, with no human in the loop at all. Reserve actual approval for the requests where judgement is genuinely required: access to something sensitive, a request that falls outside someone's normal role, anything with a real cost attached.
Role-based provisioning is what makes this scale. If access is granted based on a defined role rather than an individual request each time, onboarding someone into a role automatically grants everything that role needs, and there's no forty-request weekly queue in the first place — the requests that remain are genuinely the exceptions, which is exactly the population that deserves a human looking at them.
The trap to avoid is automating access grants without automating the corresponding revocation. A rule that grants access automatically when someone joins a role, with no equivalent automatic removal when they leave it, produces access sprawl that's worse than the manual process it replaced, because nobody's reviewing it manually anymore and nothing else is either.
