Identity Management 2008

Posted 1 year, 4 months ago at 11:01 pm. 0 comments

Today I was in Canary Wharf for IDM2008.  I was hoping to get insight/inspiration for our Identity and Access Management I have the dubious honour of being the Business Analyst for.  Especially after suffering our first hostile workshop on Wednesday afternoon from those suspicious of the business case.  Which is possibly actually true.  With many of our projects I sometimes feel we still make the technical case really well, but don’t articulate the costs and problems of the status quo and the benefits that could be realised from change well enough, in terms the business can really appreciate. This is particularly important for this type of infrastrucutre project…after all this is something us folks in IT just do…right???

The biggest message to come from the range of case studies and consultants chipping in with their expertise was that identity projects are really hard and difficult and complex.  Great I feel so much better about my task now!!.  It gives me that vague feeling of ‘poison chalice’ that I get whenever our business stakeholders leave an interview or workshop and wince and wish me good luck.

Fortunately there were a few nuggets of advice on how to go about things…

You need the business case.  You need the executive sponsor.  you need a good grasp of the business requirements to give you confidence to go live.  You need to get a grip of the project scope to stop yourselves trying to do too much in too improbable a timescale.  Although I couldn’t help feeling a little rueful that many of these points were made by our consultants on the project – and still that’s how ours ended up.

Oh and you need Use Cases Use Cases Use Cases.  Requirements for a middleware system are really hard to do, so you need to go back to the process.  Despite this being quite generic advice, and the case studies not able to give me much specific input, as there are as many IDM solutions as there are organisations it was a useful day for getting the brain ticking and helping me clarify the elements that I need to focus on.  In particular I need to go back to my interview questions and workshop plan and tighten up the focus on identity processes rather than domain mapping (which is interesting but risks being a diversion from the core requirements if I pursue it too far).  It also reinforced the need for me to tease out and define more precisely the project scope and use the various contexts and methodologies to put our business case in some sort of context.