Seems like a strange question for a hardened and pragmatic cybersecurity practice, right? But it’s actually quite necessary to the ongoing and rapid evolution of Identity Access Management (IAM). We are at the forefront of an IAM revolution. IAM has always striven for better automation and the possibility of how machines could make more informed decisions due to the necessity, ubiquity, and potentially overwhelming nature of the IAM presence in an organization. This can quickly become a “whack-a-mole” exercise as humans manually review and make decisions that can have rippling effects within their infrastructure. Artificial Intelligence (AI), previously the stuff of science fiction, with a rote implementation that has yet to fulfill the prophecy of Isaac Asimov is now seeing arguably great strides with the fervor over facets like ChatGPT and its growing list of possibilities. But still, automation, machine learning, and even AI must be curated. Nowhere is this more true and intense than in cybersecurity. At some point and typically many points, a human must review, ensure, check, double check, talk to another human(s) to validate, and then perform the whole process over again at various points in the life cycle. We always try to lessen this need, but it never fully goes away. The real challenge though, is perception; the blurry ideals and expectations that inherently exist in human nature and understanding. And it’s not human fault, much like the shortcomings of AI are not its fault. Information output is only as good as information input. You don’t know what you don’t know. For humans, erroneous and/or incomplete information creates extraneous cognitive load, doubt, and ultimately anxiety. That’s a recipe for disaster in an IAM environment. So how do we solve it in the now and not wait upon the robot dreams of some future state?
Enter Tuebora. Tuebora’s founders saw this gap even as the visionary concept of Self-Driven IAM became a realized differentiator for Tuebora and its customers in the IAM space. Not just in continuing to evolve the technology through prescriptive analytics, metrics, adaptive automation, and rapid implementation. Not just in evangelizing the current and future concepts of Tuebora’s IAM offerings and growing the customer base. What Tuebora has manifested is a true User Experience ecosystem. The task to Tuebora’s UX team: Methodically try to understand the goals and desires of our customers (current and potential) and their users; keep in constant but frictionless communication internally and externally to tell stories that evolve and synthesize innovation and product delivery understanding. Make vivid the alignment of aggregated User Research, UX strategy, and Design Operations with business goals and the product roadmap.
Today we strive to understand the person’s basic needs behind digital identity and cultivate confidence, efficiency, and even joy while still providing a deep understanding of the secured environment. Tuebora's expertise in Generative and Evaluative research methods as well as an integral understanding of established usability heuristics: Heuristic Evaluation, User Interviews and Usability Testing, Customer Experience Working groups (CXWGs create a forum for customers to interact with each other where Tuebora facilitates and curates the discussions as moderator – secret sauce omitted here), and exercises in Qualitative and Quantitative user feedback allow us to keep pace with, verify, and evolve what we discovered in machine learning/analytics and advances in automated processes. Our complementary advances in dynamic and modular technology allied with human understanding of cognitive barriers and gateways make us a truly disruptive force in the IAM market.
Our partnered and collaborative product design and engineering teams adhere to, among other tenets, the Product Design definition of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (Steven Bradley, 2010):
1. Functionality - Does it work?
2. Reliability - Does it work when I need it to?
3. Usability - Can I figure out how to make it work?
4. Proficiency - Can it show me how to make it work better?
5. Creativity - How else can this work for me?
As part of our journey to interacting with and understanding our users, we analyze all the elements of our business ecosystem, including peripheral understanding across customer support tickets. For example, we partnered with the Customer Success team to cut down on the sometimes-siloed nature of support tickets through analysis and reaching out to the customer base to further define cognitive friction; not only what they want, but also what they need to solve problems they might not quite understand holistically. As they log singular tickets, we take the time to discover the possible aggregate issue and address their overall need so that it doesn’t repeat in context or other areas.
As we continue on our journey, we are applying the UX concepts of empathy, definition, and ideation not only with customers but internally. We are working to understand each other and test that understanding. As our technology and UX strategy evolves, we will get you up and running quickly and keep you moving forward and informed. Our low impact UX touchpoints will ensure that everyone knows where we are going and how we are going to get there. Stay tuned for more discussion around the burning issues that IAM stakeholders face when it comes to tools and processes.
