Identity provisioning is a subfield of Identity and Access Management (IAM). It is a technology thanks to which many identity stores are synchronized, merged and maintained. Identity provisioning takes care of technical tasks during the whole user lifecycle: when a new employee is hired, when his responsibilities change or he leaves the company (deprovisioning) . It helps the organization to work more effectively as its goal is to automate as much as possible.
The provisioning system usually takes information about employees from the Human Resource (HR) system. So when a new employee is recorded into HR system, this information is detected and pulled by the provisioning system. After that it is processed to determine a set of roles that each user should have. These roles determine and create accounts the users should have, so everything is ready for new users on the very first day. If a user is transferred to another department or his privileges change, similar processes happen again. If the employee leaves the company, identity provisioning systems makes sure all his accounts are closed.
Example
A new manager is hired in the organization. He is recorded into HR systems and thanks to identity provisioning, his company email is created, he gets access to working group as well as cloud storage. When the previous manager retires, identity provisioning makes sure all his accounts are disabled in accordance with the safety of the organization data.