Some employers in Finland reckon they spend hundreds of thousands of euros on IT support calls for absent-minded workers who forget their passwords after holidays.
Many employees who use computers at work forget their passwords when they return from holidays in August and January, resulting in a deluge of phone calls and emails to tech support services.
With around 38,000 employees, the City of Helsinki is one of the country's largest employers. Every year, 12,000 forgotten password-related requests are made, according to Mikko Rusama, the city's director of digitalisation, noting that those requests add up to quite large sums.
"In terms of just changing passwords, the cost is more than 100,000 euros per year, and on top of that all the [extra] related work it causes," he said.
Rusama's estimate was based on the city's IT support subcontractor's prices, workers' salaries and the average time spent on the process of getting a new password.
HUS spends up to €200k annually
Meanwhile, the cost of helping employees with system passwords in the Helsinki and Uusimaa Hospital District (HUS) is around 150,000 to 200,000 euros per year, according to the district's IT management director, Pertti Mäkelä.
The district employs about 25,000 individuals but the number of user IDs - more than 45,000 - used on the district's computer systems is nearly double that figure,
Mäkelä said there are roughly 800-1,100 requests made regarding forgotten passwords per month. Last year, there were exactly 11,485 such requests for help. Like the City of Helsinki, a portion of the district's IT is outsourced, he explained.
14k requests per year at City of Espoo
The City of Espoo has about 15,000 employees, and they make 14,000 requests for help with passwords every year, according to the city's IT manager Juha Valtaharju.
But he said it was difficult to calculate the exact cost of that password help, because the broader support package it buys from IT services and telecom firm Elisa includes such assistance.
Valtaharju noted that working hours lost due to forgotten passwords should be taken into account, but also added that it is difficult to accurately measure those costs.
What can be done?
The representatives of the cities of Helsinki and Espoo as well as HUS all said they are aiming to minimise the hassle of changing employee passwords, through various reforms and services.
Espoo city and HUS hospital district workers are already able to reset their login passwords on their own, using self-service portals, according to the representatives. The city of Helsinki is planning to set up a similar system for its workers.
HUS' Mäkelä said the numbers of password help requests have already been reduced by consolidating usernames and passwords across its various computer systems, rather than having unique usernames and passwords for each system.
"Until a few years ago, we could receive 800 calls on the first Monday in August. But the changes helped reduce that figure," he explained.
He noted that even though some would like to make changing passwords easier and faster, there are good reasons for keeping security tight.
"For data security and protection, the industry has to do some things that seem to complicate end users' everyday lives. But it has to be done because there's patient data behind those usernames," Mäkelä said.
In practice that means passwords need to be complex - and likely difficult to remember - and the same IDs or passwords should not be used on multiple services. Passwords also need to be changed regularly and sometimes verified, for example, by telephone, he explained.
The city of Helsinki's Rusama said password help requests can be reduced with ongoing IT system reforms. The aim of those changes is to centralise the city's various computer networks and systems, as they are currently decentralised and maintained by several firms and service providers.