Identity Management Road-map#

The Road Map will break down the big vision into phases that are reasonable to be implemented given the constraints within the IDM Vision. The road map is often necessary to to help "sell" the project present to upper-management and/or to obtain funding. Some of the constraints on IDM projects include:

• Budget
• Resource Availability
• Other concurrent or dependent Projects. We need to wait until the Home-Grown HR application is transitioned to PeopleSoft.
• Shock and Awe. If you implement an entire IDM project all at once, the shock and awe of the users is usually overwhelming.

Do You Need A Road-Map?#

Do you need one? You might not. Most organizations do. An Identity Management Road-map might be overkill for your organization. If you have a very "specific situation" that needs to be delt with but nothing more than that, then you might not need an IDM Road-map.

Some examples of "specific situations"#

We have seen some specific situations where there are point specific implementations that might not need a road-map like:

• your organization just got slammed on an audit for "orphan accounts" in AD, but everything else was in perfect order.
• you work for a healthcare organization that needs SSO to appease the docs who have to remember 25 different usernames and passwords for various applications, but everything else is in good shape (i.e., identity data integrity looks good, user access recertification processes are fine, etc.).

In situations like these, find the right technology and apply it. This might require you an afternoon or two of white-boarding sessions with an Identity Management specialist to help you compare the pros/cons of the various toys in the identity toolbox that can solve your problem along with a cost analysis of software and services.

Yea, but..#

What we often find is organizations have an assortment of "tools", often home-grown, that have been put in place over the years and that several of these "specific situations" has come up that were all dealt with as "specific situations". Often these "tools' were deployed by a specific group and without the knowledge of the other "tools" even being available.

So now the organization has several "dis-jointed" tools that fixed "specific situations", but do not work well together and perhaps each of them has specific "quirks" that you keep working around or making excuses for the "quirks".

The development of a IDM Roadmap will create a strategic direction that will help prevent the continuation and proliferation of these "tools" for these "specific situations" and help your organization not to be led astray by these specific situations".

A good workshop will identify stakeholders across your organization, set up interviews, and systematically find "specific situations" corporate-wide. The result will be a better architecture that satisfies your organizations requirements as well as stands the test of time.