Live Q&A and Discussion - Best Practices and Use Cases

Now, thank you from our end here, once again, really valuable information and very practical examples. We do have a few questions from the audience. We'll say a quick goodbye to Phillip. He's unfortunately not able to join us for the questions, but Martin and Matthias are here for you. So our first question is, how should one approach the identity fabric architecture for an existing IM solution? Do you suggest a roadmap approach or a standard approach to, to working with existing solutions?

Yeah, I think the first important step is really to understand where you are right now. So mapping your existing infrastructure to the identity fabric and then parallel identifying what your requirements are. This is something that we had on the, on the final slide, the requirements analysis and the continuous update of the requirements. And then identifying, So it's, it's a traditional project approach. It's a fit gap analysis under identifying where you are, what you need and where you want to go to.

And therefore the identity fabric is a perfect tool together with the reference architecture when you go down deeper into the individual building blocks. Thanks for that. And next question, one of the interesting terms which came up in the last session was requirements analysis, continuous update. And this is a key success factor here, but how would you recommend dealing with constantly changing and evolving requirements?

I think there was one, a minor flaw on the final slide that we shown because it says identity projects or AM project, and we need to think in an IM program, which consists of individual projects. And then this makes perfect sense to understand how requirements are evolving over time. And that you will always create a version 1, 1, 1 to two, one to three of your existing identity fabric and then implement that as an actual infrastructure and architecture.

And in such an program approach, you can constantly deal with these changing requirements and update your requirements statement and your analysis over time to, to suit the needs of an organization. And they will change faster than expected, I believe, by the way. I believe that the slides as post project and program A check. Okay. Well that's a, a note then to the audience. You can also go check as well the, the slides and recordings of all the sessions today are gonna be available for you. So if you find you need to refer back to this material, it's available to you.

And next question on the topic of data quality, I am, data quality is often an issue. So how does this fit into the identity fabric and does it fit differently as compared to the identity reference architecture?

So I, I would dare to say that this is out of capabilities stem. So it's, it's a technical or there are technical features that help in improving identity information quality. And this is more the technical perspective on building blocks in the reference architecture. And there's a capability or a set of capabilities that help in increasing that. And so identity information quality is a complex theme. And there's for instance, a leadership brief.

I believe we have written a while ago about, sorry, improving identity information quality, which is available in our huge research library as one of the many documents in there. And that, that for instance, goes a bit more into detail. So it is about, first, I think one of the most important things for identity information quality is processes and ownership. So what other processes for identity data flowing. And that is what we had as part of the, the success factors. And it is about ownership. So who is responsible for which attribute even sometimes in which type of change.

So for creating it might be someone different than for changing attributes and this must be well defined. So it's capabilities that then support technically in doing that. And it's the entire framework for a good IM and really spend time on processes. This is very, very worse the time and money spent for really defining well sorted, well defined processes.

Especially if you're looking into, into attribute based, policy based access control, you rely on data quality and usually we say don't let Im solve other people's problems, for example, or, or weaknesses for example, when it comes to HR process, et cetera. But you are relying on this quality of the information to, to provide proper decision making support. And this is really of important and sometimes you need to clean up data on the fly. That might be also something, and there's a specific capability also the reference architecture that actually takes care of that.

If you can't heal the process, you might even heal the data, although as Martin says, this is the, the best choice to heal it in the processes and where this information is created. And maybe to add one more thing, I think one of the thero aspects of the identity fabric is the holistic perspective and a lot of identity information on general data quality problems arise because data resides in different places. So multiple instances of the same data resides in multiple places.

And by, by having a more holistic perspective, you can reduce these cases. And I think there's one, one of these sort of axioms in it that is when you duplicate data, it tends to get out of zig. That's an axiom that happens. So the identify fabric as the unified perspective also can help you in reducing the challenges here. Thanks for your thoughts here. And perhaps a final question before we move into our, our last session for the day, thinking about priorities and especially balancing the, the short term needs against a longer term strategy.

So how can you balance perhaps a, a short-term challenge that you need to fix for a day to day or tactical solution, but how do you make sure that this doesn't stand in conflict then with a longer term identity fabric strategy? Yeah, I think it's brilliant daily task of a good advisor, isn't it?

I think, I can't remember many, maybe not even any projects I've been involved where we haven't this conflict because it's usually that there's an urgent pressure and there's the wish to do something which lasts for the next couple of years and next decade. And I think that that is something which is sometimes about tactical solutions, sometimes about fixes to the current problem or even organizational solutions while then proceeding on the, with the strategic plan and understanding. And I think this is where the advices come in.

Like what I always try to do with the customers is to help them to understand if you go down that route and do this tactical or you go for that tool, this will have that impact and you can go back into the standard in that and that way. So helping them to understand the potential impacts, but also identifying the path which helps them to get a problem fixed but not losing drag for sort of achieving the strategic goal.

Yeah, always have the exit strategy already at hand. So when, when you have a tactical solution that is done maybe the the key here. Yeah. Great. Well thank you very much and I will hand this stage back over to you for a CL final closing.