Cracking the silent failures in enterprise communication

Revamping Internal Messaging: A Case Study

In large enterprises, internal chatter remains a stumbling block, even amid a plethora of digital utilities. McKinsey’s research indicates that employees devote roughly 20 % of each work week hunting for an internal file or locating a colleague best suited to solve an issue. The economic impact is stark: Grammarly reports that businesses lose an estimated $1.2 trillion annually due to poor employee communication, encompassing lost productivity, misunderstandings, and execution delays.

Silent System Failures

These communication systems do not falter spectacularly; they deteriorate quietly, producing stale membership lists, blind spots in messaging, and mounting compliance threats. Distribution Lists (DLs) and their dynamic alternating forms (Dynamic Distribution Lists, DDLs) were engineered to schedule who receives what message, but in practice they resemble fixed mailing labels in a world where teams continually shift and access needs evolve each day.

Surendra Vitla’s Encounter

Surendra Vitla, a software engineer with almost a decade’s experience, joined a global financial intelligence firm as part of its identity and access management (IAM) initiatives. While embedded in the capital‑market firm, he noticed that their DDL system—built upon Microsoft Identity Manager (MIM) and reinforced by custom PowerShell scripts—was strained under its own weight. Updates were manual, rules were hard‑coded, and HR changes took days or weeks to propagate in the mailing lists that dictated operational workflows.

Reimagining DL Governance

Instead of patching the system, Vitla proposed that the organization treat DLs as governed identity assets, rather than an afterthought of IT. He asked: what if the same platform used to manage access—SailPoint IdentityIQ—could govern communication groups? Although SailPoint was not originally built for communication governance, Vitla argued that its core strength—real‑time identity lifecycle management—was exactly what the firm needed to regain control over its communication architecture.

Implementation

Over the following months, Vitla built a rules engine inside SailPoint that replaced the firm’s brittle MIM scripts. He wired the system to live HR feeds from Workday and synchronized identity data from Active Directory. Distribution Lists weren’t just updated; they were rebuilt. More than 1,500 DDLs were reconstructed from the ground up with custom‑built SailPoint objects, where naming conventions, exclusion rules, and role‑based filters were all incorporated into the framework.

• No off‑the‑shelf lists existed; they reflected the nuances of the business operation.
• Some lists grouped employees by job title or cost center, others by application access, managerial hierarchy, or country of operation.
• Contractors, executives, and joint‑venture affiliates were selectively filtered in or out.

The goal wasn’t to simplify DDLs, but to portray the real, evolving contour of a global organization in near‑real time.

Outcomes

Vitla noted, “The project was not about automation for its own sake. It was about ensuring that the right people were in the right conversations, at the right time, with traceability baked in.” Indeed, the results were immediate:

• DL‑related support tickets dropped by more than 80 %.
• Manual effort shrank by 5,000 hours annually.
• Cost savings—approximately $300,000 per year—arose not from layoffs but from eliminating the need to constantly correct a system that should never have failed.

More than financial effects, the cultural shift was profound. Teams that had relied on workaround solutions began treating distribution lists as infrastructure, not merely as conveniences. The new architecture extended to govern application notification groups, onboarding flows, and policy alerts. The project reframed identity governance: it governed not just who could access what, but who should be informed.

Legacy and Influence

Today, the firm’s SailPoint instance governs system access, notification routing, and training enrollment—all in real time. Though the lists remain dynamic, they are now accountable.

Vitla modestly states, “I saw a gap and had the tools to close it.” Yet his work is capturing attention within the identity governance community, inspiring teams in adjacent industries to explore whether SailPoint—or comparable platforms—can carry a double burden: managing access while controlling awareness.

Conclusion

In an industry where complexity often overshadows clarity, Vitla’s project illustrates the value of practical, well‑integrated interventions. The outcome was not a flashy innovation but a model for modern organizations to embed trust in their communications systems—making them secure, transparent, and responsive to real‑world needs.