Approval requests management

What is an approval request, and why is it important?

In most organizations, certain actions cannot be executed immediately.
Granting access to an application, ordering equipment, or approving a specific employee request usually requires validation from one or more stakeholders.

Approval requests exist to ensure that:

the right people are involved at the right time,
costs and security risks are controlled,
internal policies are consistently enforced.

In Siit, approvals are not standalone actions. They are fully integrated into workflows, allowing you to control when a request can move forward, who must validate it, and what happens depending on the decision taken.

This article is designed for Siit admins who configure workflows. It explains how approvals work, how to design them effectively, and how your configuration choices are reflected in the experience of approvers and employees.

How approvals work in Siit (admin perspective)

In Siit, an approval is a workflow action that introduces a decision point in the lifecycle of a request.

When an approval is triggered:

the request is paused,
one or several approvers are notified,
the workflow continues only once a decision is made.

Each approval action automatically creates two possible paths:

Approved
Rejected

You can then decide which actions should run in each case (provisioning access, notifying the requester, closing the request, escalating, etc.).

Approvals can be used at any moment in a workflow:

early, to block unnecessary processing,
or later, just before a sensitive or costly action.

Designing an effective approval flow

1. Decide where validation is required

Before adding an approval, ask yourself:

What risk or decision does this approval control?
What should be blocked until approval is given?

Typical moments where approvals are used:

before granting app or system access,
before ordering hardware or licenses,
before executing automated actions via integrations or webhooks.

Once added to the workflow, the approval becomes a hard gate: nothing after it will run until a decision is taken.

2. Define who should approve the request

Siit allows you to define approvers in a flexible way:

Dynamic approvers, such as:
- the requester’s manager,
- the app owner,
- any role derived from your data.
Static approvers, by selecting one or more specific employees.

You can also combine both approaches and create multi-level approval sequences, where several approvals are required in a defined order.

This allows you to involve each stakeholder only when necessary, without overloading a single approver with decisions outside their scope.

3. Provide context to help approvers make the right decision

When configuring an approval, you can include a contextual message for the approver.

This message can dynamically reference:

the request details,
the requester information,
the service or application involved.

Providing enough context upfront reduces back-and-forth, speeds up decision-making, and avoids approvals being rejected simply due to lack of information.