“Chance favors the prepared mind.” – Louis Pasteur

My post on Identity Management Implementation Risks seems to have struck a chord with a few people.

Shekhar Jha asked for specific real-world examples. James McGovern posted a comment on Ash’s blog that he wished that I had videotaped the presentation for people to watch. Michael thought the term “resource” was de-humanizing. In yesterday’s Identity Management Newsletter, Dave Kearns wrote about my list of deadly risks. (This specific newsletter will show up on the Network World website in a few days; it always lags the email version.)

It is heartening to see people realize that Identity Management is more than just technology. These projects touch a lot of systems, require business transformation and impact a broad range of stakeholders. But aren’t Identity projects just like other IT projects?

Consider this equation:

Identity Management Business Complexity
(cross-functional business impact, many stakeholders, high visibility)
+ Identity Management System Complexity
(many integration touch points, many moving parts)
= Identity Management Project Complexity

Proper planning is an important key to managing the inherit complexity of Identity Management projects.

So, let’s consider the first risk – Poor Pre-Project Preparation (how’s that for alliteration?)

Lack of preparation for an Identity Management project can:

1. Set false expectations in the mind of stakeholders. Lack of good communications early in the cycle will have many people expecting more than can be achieved in a short time.
2. Force the implementation team to spin their wheels when they should be doing work. If the project is not well planned, key decisions will still need to be made, even if they disrupt the orderly flow of implementation work.
3. Cause implementation engineers to define business requirements. This hurts. Identity projects must deliver business value in order to be effective. But if business and technical requirements are not well documented and understood, and if the design is not linked tightly to those requirements, the folks on the front line with fingers on the keyboards, may be force to make bad assumptions or wait around until correct requirements definitions are provided.
4. Result in additional time and expense. The inefficiencies described above will be revealed in terms of over-budget and delayed schedule. Note that these budget busters are usually not technical issues, but business and planning issues.
5. Undermine confidence in the project. Business units need to see business value quickly. Delays and increased costs due to poor planning will drain away confidence and support

So, what should be done? Here are some key areas where plannning must occur:

1. Project sponsorship, governance and organization. Who is really the project champion? Who really holds the purse strings? How can we assemble and work with the right set of stakeholders that will help this project succeed? How can we organize and marshall available resources to assure success?
2. Requirements (Identity Management software + infrastructure). We must really know what defines success for our project. Too often, requirements are ill defined or poorly documented. Time spend carefully defining requirements, not just for software functionality but for the hardware and networking infrastructure in which it is to operate, will be paid back many times over.
3. Extended project resources. A technical project team is often inclined to think of itself as the center of the universe. However, the success of an Identity project depends on many people beyond the technical team: systems administrators, data owners, subject matter experts, testers, system users, trainers, business unit representatives.
4. Communications. Because of the so many people, in many roles in an enterprise are involved with Identity Management projects, it is vital that a strong communications plan be implemented up front. People need to know what is going on. Much has to be decided and approved. We must be prepared to communicate and communicate well.
5. Change Control. Despite our best efforts to define requirements and plan projects, things will change. Modifications will need to be negotiated, documented and managed. Planning for and agreeing upon a change control process up front will smooth this bumpy road.

An example? Let me give a glimpse of two. I know a project manager who spends half time on each of two identity projects. In the first, before he took over, all these rules of preparation were violated – fuzzy requirements, weak governance, shoddy change control, poor communications. We are still patching things up after 14 months.

The second? We arm-wrestled the customer into funding a requirements/architecture project up front so we both knew what was to be delivered. A change control process was defined and agreed to in the Statement of Work. The deliverables from extended project participants were defined in advance. Now, does the project have its hiccups? Yes. But it is under control. It will be a success. Planning really pays off.

Tags: Identity
Digital Identity
Identity Management
Project Management

Forrester Resarch named Sun Java System Identity Management Suite as the “Provisioning Industry’s Undisputed Market Leader.”

“By a large margin, Sun Java System Identity Manager came in as the most-function-rich solution in Forrester’s evaluation. The product led all of its competitors in several categories: connector functionality, policy management, auditing, and architecture. … Sun Java System Identity Manager does everything a user would want a provisioning product to do.”

Tags: Identity
Digital Identity
Identity Management
Sun Microsystems
Forrester Research

Listen Up
Originally uploaded by cuibel.

I have really enjoyed viewing the scenery photos Cuibel has posted on Flickr. Who knew that the Great Salt Lake could be so beautiful?

Tags: Flickr
Great Salt Lake

I happened across this post after reading an article on e-learning. It reminded me of a funny rat-training experience my sister had many years ago.

For an eighth grade science fair project, my sister taught a pair of white rats to play basketball. She gave a food reward to each rat when it stuffed a whiffle ball through a hoop. The rats would happily play basketball in order to get food.

All was well until the day of the science fair. That morning, the female rat gave birth to a litter of baby rats. Understandably, she refused to play basketball.

The male rat? Of course, he went right on playing basketball! What did you expect?

Tags: Rat
Basketball
Learning

I taught a class today addressing best practices in Identity Management implementation. Part of the presentation was entitled “Seven Common Risks.” I lobbied to call this “Seven Deadly Risks,” but some folks thought that title was a bit over the top. Nonetheless, here are seven risky behaviors that could kill your Identity Management project.

• Poor Pre-Project Preparation
• Poor Requirements Definition
• Large Initial Scope
• Inexperienced Resources
• Poor Project Methodology
• Scope Creep
• Not Using Available Support

I’ll elaborate on each in the next few weeks – discussing why each is important and what you can do to migitate the risk.

Tags: Identity
Digital Identity
Identity Management

According to a Sun press release, American Express has chosen Sun’s Java Enterprise System (JES) platform to provide a new integrated software environment for critical applications, including Identity Management.

“We found an excellent value proposition in the Java Enterprise System as it will help us to consolidate our licensing costs, reduce integration costs, and improve both functionality and flexibility of our distributed applications, identity management and web services,” said Phil Steitz, chief technology officer, American Express.

Tags: Identity
Digital Identity
Identity Management
Sun Microsystems
JES
American Express

Tags:
Blogging
Non Sequitur

Tags: Blogging
Non Sequitur

Cipher: “Zero. One that has no weight, worth, or influence. Non-entity. “

The story about a dead man riding the subway for hours before anyone realized he was dead reminds me of an old story, Cipher in the Snow, about a young kid who had been told he was nothing so many times, by so many people, that he grew to believe them. When he stumbled off the school bus to collapse and die in a snowbank, nobody really cared.

How tragic it is that any of us would dismiss another human being as worthless or good for nothing. How sad that any person would have to go through life thinking that he or she was a zero.

When we all realize that every human being is of infinite worth, that every human Identity is eternal, we would all be more civil with each other.

Tags: Identity
Eternal Identity

This is really weird. It speaks volumes about how New York commuters mind their own business.

Tags: New York Subway