Home » Identity & Access » Identity Management

Identity Management: Implementation Dos and Dont's

Just getting started on an IDM roll-out? Some pointers from people who've been there, done that.

DO prepare for a long project. Because of the complexity of IDM, implementations can easily last a year or more, experts say. ANSI's IDM implementation took about a year and half, according to Petosa.

This can lead to frustration, Perkins says. "I've been surprised by the number of people who've expressed disappointment and disillusion at the progress and process of installing these systems," he says. "These are very complex and difficult systems to install, and the more complex your environment, and the more applications and platforms you wish to have on the workflow system, the more complicated it becomes."

One way to ease the frustration is to stage the project. At ANSI, Petosa's group started with the company's CRM and online system and later added the accounting and human resource systems, defining more rules as they went to achieve the process flow they wanted. "It's like re-engineering; you can't do it in one step," he says.

DON'T assume you can accomplish this in-house. Both Petosa and Spinelli say they couldn't have succeeded with their implementations without lots of vendor support. "This is not for the weak of heart," Petosa says. "You need to look for a company with excellent VAR support." The risk of making a mistake, he says, is huge. "It will destroy your data and your systems if it's poorly designed."

But DON'T rely 100 percent on outside help. "You have to be an active participant," Petosa warns, especially when it comes to defining your business processes. "Integrators can't dig deep enough," he says. "You need a dedicated staff working with the implementation team."

Spinelli says it was beneficial to have staff that was already experienced with Sun's Java environment. "We can leverage our Java development team to code the identity management tool," he says. In addition, he hired a team of coders who had previously worked at Waveset Technologies, the identity management software vendor that Sun acquired.

DO get upper management support. At Equifax, Spinelli kicked off the effort by inviting the company's CTO as well as high-level executives from HR, architecture, operations, legal and financial to a three-day meeting. The group determined the business drivers for an IDM system, which turned out to be compliance, simplifying identities, leveraging data and metrics, and--down the road--enabling federation.

Mary Brandel is a freelance writer. Send feedback to Editor Derek Slater at dslater@cxo.com.