Access Review Fatigue Is Not a People Problem. It Is a Design Problem.
Every quarter, thousands of managers inside regulated enterprises open their certification queues and face the same impossible task.
Hundreds of entitlements. Tight deadlines. No meaningful way to tell which access actually matters.
So they do what anyone would do under those conditions. They approve everything quickly and move on.
Organizations call this access review fatigue. Most treat it as a motivation problem — managers just need to take reviews more seriously.
But that diagnosis misses the real issue entirely.
The Design Creates the Fatigue
When governance teams build certification campaigns, they typically aim for coverage. Every entitlement goes into the queue. Every reviewer gets their list. Every campaign closes with a completion percentage.
That model feels thorough. In practice, it produces noise.
When low-risk application permissions sit alongside high-risk privileged access in the same queue, reviewers lose the ability to prioritize. They cannot tell what matters. So they treat everything the same — which means they treat nothing seriously.
The design creates the fatigue. The reviewers respond rationally to a broken system.
More Campaigns Make It Worse
Some organizations respond to fatigue by increasing frequency. Quarterly campaigns become monthly. Semiannual reviews become quarterly.
But frequency without structural change just multiplies the problem. More campaigns mean more volume, more overhead, and more opportunities for rubber-stamp approvals. The noise gets louder. The signal gets weaker.
Fatigue does not come from too few reviews. It comes from too many undifferentiated decisions.
What Actually Works
Organizations that successfully reduce fatigue stop trying to review everything and start reviewing what matters.
Risk-based access certification shifts the focus. Instead of dumping every entitlement into a single queue, governance programs tier access by risk. Privileged accounts, policy-sensitive roles, and cross-boundary permissions get real scrutiny. Low-risk, stable access gets lighter treatment — or moves to exception-based monitoring.
Review triggers change too. Instead of waiting for the next quarterly campaign, reviews fire when something meaningful happens — a role change, a system escalation, a new project assignment. The review connects directly to the event that created the risk.
The result is fewer decisions per reviewer, but better ones. Reviewers engage because the queue actually reflects real risk — not just a complete inventory of every permission in the environment.
The Shift Is Structural, Not Cultural
Organizations often try to solve fatigue through training, escalation policies, or tighter deadlines. Those interventions treat the symptom, not the cause.
Fatigue disappears when governance design changes — when certification scope narrows intelligently, when risk drives prioritization, and when reviewers receive context instead of volume.
Precision produces better governance than coverage. And better governance produces exactly what regulated enterprises need most: audit defensibility built on genuine oversight rather than completed checklists.
For a deeper look at how regulated enterprises redesign access reviews to reduce fatigue and improve risk outcomes: How to Reduce Access Review Fatigue in Regulated Enterprises
