Leveraging Your Organization's Expertise: Departmental IAM Services for the Business

As organizations digitize more operational workflows, managing employee identities, authorizations, and continuous access monitoring becomes a core requirement for efficiency and compliance across both companies and government agencies. Despite widespread adoption of IAM technologies—especially IGA suites—the management of identities and, in particular, authorizations remains problematic. Traditional IT operating models, with a strict separation between business and IT, often fail to support modern enterprises. Common symptoms include slow and complex access request/approval chains, incomplete or hard-to-maintain authorization concepts, burdensome recertification and approval tasks, outdated roles that trigger Segregation of Duties violations, and difficult onboarding of applications into IGA controls. As audits increasingly focus on access governance, these weaknesses frequently surface as costly, urgent remediation findings.

A key shift is the need to involve business stakeholders directly, because IT can no longer act as an effective “translator” of domain-specific authorization requirements. User involvement is particularly essential in access approvals, reviews, and entitlement maintenance, and the line between end users and business administrators is increasingly blurred. Effective stakeholder engagement focuses on specific process areas—authorization management, authorization optimization, access request/approval, and access review/recertification—while carefully selecting participants such as department heads, auditors, application owners, role and entitlement owners, and coordination teams.

However, traditional delegated administration in monolithic IGA tools often exposes either overly complex IT-centric functions or overly generic processes that require extensive custom coding, leading to high costs, poor maintainability, and upgrade challenges. A service-oriented “Identity Fabric” approach addresses these weaknesses by defining well-delineated IAM services orchestrated through a platform model. Nexis Controle is presented as an example of this paradigm: a service-oriented add-on (or stand-alone) platform with a dynamic workflow engine, extensive configurable standard workflows, customizable stakeholder-specific interfaces, dashboards, and governance capabilities including SoD and recertification, enabling lean, stakeholder-oriented IAM services and phased business empowerment.

• Identity Governance & Administration comprises Identity Lifecycle Management (Provisioning) and Access Governance.
• Identity Lifecycle Management supports joiner/mover/leaver processes through account creation, modification, and deletion.
• Access Governance includes access requests, approvals, access audits/reviews, and access intelligence/analytics.
• Many organizations face complex and lengthy authorization request and approval processes.
• Outdated role definitions can cause conflict-of-interest issues such as Segregation of Duties violations.
• Audits often increase scrutiny of access rights management as digitalization grows.
• Many IAM/IGA suites include capabilities categorized as delegated administration.
• Nexis Controle includes more than 150 standard workflows for entitlement lifecycle management.
• Workflows in Nexis Controle are configurable using graphical modeling and safeguarded through version control.
• Nexis Controle can operate as a service-oriented add-on to an existing IAM infrastructure or as a stand-alone service with direct connections to target systems such as AD or SAP.

• “To leverage existing domain know-how, it is becoming increasingly important to involve different stakeholders directly from the business in clearly defined and properly delineated administration, review, and approval processes.”
• “User involvement is essential, when it comes to access reviews by managers or the sustainable maintenance of entitlements. The dividing line between end users and business administrators is becoming increasingly blurred.”
• “When involving the business, it is vital to be aware of the specifics of the organization in question.”
• “It is essential to identify the most relevant stakeholders and administrative processes to involve only those that can make a meaningful contribution”
• “Complex delegated administration processes wired into a monolithic IGA solution prove to be a constant source of challenges for end user organizations.”
• “This shift away from isolated systems to a service platform that provides and orchestrates a set of required IAM services and related functions is essential for overcoming the notion of IAM infrastructures that stem from traditional enterprise IAM systems.”
• “Nexis Controle has evolved into a swiss army-knife for providing Identity Analytics, Entitlement Management (Policies and Roles) and Access Governance as comprehensive, adaptable services for existing IAM architecture.”
• “Nexis is following a future-oriented approach of providing IAM services as functional building blocks augmenting modern Identity and Access Management infrastructures following the identity fabric paradigm.”
• “Compared to the delegated administration functionality of traditional IAM tools and suites, where more complex processes (such as multilevel approval procedures with delegation functionalities) have to be developed individually, it is possible to draw on best practice through ready-made capabilities with a high degree of configurability.”