Despite more than two decades of investment, Identity and Access Management (IAM) programs continue to struggle. Organizations deploy increasingly sophisticated tools, yet still face security breaches, audit failures, user frustration, and escalating complexity.
This keynote explores 25 years of recurring IAM pitfalls, from early directory services and compliance‑driven provisioning to today’s Zero Trust ambitions and explosion of non‑human identities. Through a chronological and thematic lens, it reveals why the same failure patterns repeat regardless of technology generation or vendor.
Rather than focusing on tools, the presentation examines the organizational, data, and governance assumptions that have quietly undermined IAM initiatives: treating IAM as an IT project instead of a business capability, underestimating identity data quality, over‑engineering roles, ignoring user experience, fragmenting identity platforms, and prioritizing audit checkboxes over real risk reduction.
Attendees will leave with a clear mental model for evaluating IAM initiatives and a critical insight: IAM success depends less on better technology and more on better assumptions.
