John Tolbert: Methodology

Hello. I wanted to talk for a few minutes today about our co and coal advisory services and how we help clients, not only with our events, but in research, but with actual advisory engagements. So we do as, you know, have events such as this one and many others throughout the year. And we have excellent research, I think covering identity management cybersecurity in the digital transformation, but we can also individually help clients, enterprise clients, and small to medium businesses come up with the right tools choice in particular.

And we do things beyond that, such as roadmap, definition, benchmarking assessments, and maturity assessments, looking at their overall identity and security portfolios and how to improve that. So our content can help with that being part of our community, being a subscriber, getting access to the research and participating in our events are great ways to stay in contact. And then also we do have these advisory services that allow us to work one on one with clients and help them improve their security and identity architecture. So let's look at tools choice for just a minute by this.

We mean selecting the appropriate set of tools, let's say in this case for consent and privacy management, since we've been talking about privacy in particular, this would be a good place to start. So the tools choice process begins with understanding your requirements and sort of noting your as is architecture and helping you come up with a two B architecture, figuring out which technology insertion is right for you to solve the use cases that you have. So we will gather the requirements, document them.

We can help by creating a short list of vendors in the relevant areas, and then actually composing a detailed list of technical questions, which we will circulate with you and with the vendors. And then when we receive responses, we will help you evaluate the results of that. If you've invited vendors in to do presentations about their products, we can also do an analysis there. And then based on what we know in industry, we can help you down select to first of all, a long list, and then a short list of tools that you may be interested in trying out in a proof of concept phase.

And here you might take two or three different vendor solutions, give them a couple of use cases and, and bring them in-house and see how, how that works out. And then we can provide a final analysis on that as well. So at a little lower level here, we'll look at how the choice of tools plays out.

Again, we start with the requirements analysis. Sometimes in large organizations, there may be multiple stakeholders who have different ideas about what's really important. We can help with the negotiation process and coming up with that definitive list of requirements, putting together the list of vendors that we think are most relevant for you, both a, a longer list and a, a short list of the ones that we think would probably best meet the needs that are articulated. Then we can help with the actual requests for information or requests for proposal support.

We have information on our buyer's compass documents that really lend themselves to helping create the RFP documents in particular. So we can tailor that for your individual needs and use cases. And we can watch vendor presentations and then take into account not only the results of the questionnaire, but the vendor presentations and analyze those for you and help you come up with that very short list that you may wanna bring in for a proof of concept, and then define the use cases, execute that and produce a final result for you.

So just a high level, look at what maybe one graph from a tools choice, final report might look like here. We're talking again about consent and privacy management. You'd get a bar graph that shows, you know, on the one side we've got what we were calling mandatory use cases. And then also the optional use cases will rank the vendors objectively and then show how each one did. So this makes it, you know, graphically easier to understand which vendors are potentially the best for your use cases.

So again, in the final report, we'll look at, you know, not only what vendors tell us in terms of their answers to the questionnaires, but also what we know about the product. We stay up to date. We speak with all the relevant vendors in, in the fields of I am cybersecurity and digital transformation. So we can bring additional knowledge to the process that that may be missing from the questionnaire process or what they may not cover in their presentations. So we can add value to the process that way.

And then we can look at the questionnaires and sometimes vendors in RFIs and RFPs, don't fill out all the, or don't provide answers to all the questions. So we can add value to that part of the process as well, by telling you what we know about that vendor in the field, and then this fits as part of an overall roadmap definition, tool selection is usually just one part.

And we have kind of a similar engagement approach where we'll meet with you and your team, your stakeholders, go through the requirements, document, your use cases, host a workshop with you, refine the information that's produced as a result, and then put together a final presentation, discussing the results.

And then also target that for specific users in your organization, if it's at the executive level or, or management level, or even working with the architects and a quick look at, you know, maybe what a sample roadmap recommendation might be for your overarching consent and privacy management program, we'll put together a high level list of let's in a Gantt chart sort of format and, and then show how each step flows from one to another and then what needs to happen and in which order, so it's practical program and project management advice for executing a roadmap.

So thank you and hope to work with you in an advisory project soon.