As Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) leaders strive to keep up with a changing workforce and new IT systems, innovative Identity and Access Management (IAM) solutions offer a faster path to increasing coverage. The post-modern IGA approach encourages collaboration between internal business stakeholders as well as multiple external IAM vendors. Instead of playing a zero-sum game where IAM platform providers are gunning for one contract, post-modern IGA takes a more holistic view, surfacing persistent IAM challenges and accommodating emergent solutions from both existing and new vendors.
New perspectives on evolving IAM challenges
Evolving access threats and new IT applications and assets drive an increasingly complex IAM environment. Finding and keeping people with the skills to manage various IAM solutions adds another layer to the challenge. McKinsey & Company confirmed that executives are consistently reporting that rapid technology change leaves critical shortages in data analytics and software engineering (from Managing your external supply system for innovation, October 2019). That shortage has an outsize effect because your IT needs grow as your company grows.
Leveraging the expertise of IAM vendors is one way to mitigate the growing complexity of IAM and the shortage of people to deal with it. IAM providers with targeted modular solutions introduce new perspectives and insights into a complex problem space. A partner relationship with multiple IAM providers can present contrasting perspectives that serve to reveal or clarify new ways to reduce cost or solve IAM challenges.
The greatest benefit of the multi-vendor IGA approach may be the opportunity to inject new ideas into established processes and workflows, rather than losing or trading away potential solutions in favor of others that might simply have different drawbacks.
Cross-functional cooperation
Post-modern IGA with its modular IAM systems also allows for the flexibility to focus on acute pain points. This is conducive to cross-functional cooperation between your people and the systems they share, so these systems not only co-exist but supplement each other. With improved collaboration between systems, the environment is primed for more open dialog between IT and business stakeholders to discover what’s working as well as what’s not.
By avoiding wholesale replacement that satisfies requirements for one part of the organization at the expense of another, augmenting a struggling IAM solution creates a path for more effective collaboration between internal stakeholders. This collaboration is critical. “The success of the future of applications depends on organizations’ ability to bring business and IT together for collaborative and continuous creative work,” says Saniye Alaybeyi, Senior Director Analyst at Gartner (from IT-Business Collaboration Fuels the Future of Applications, July 2022).
Organizations often choose the post-modern IGA approach as a means to increase coverage more quickly, but find the hidden superpower of the approach is that it smooths forward momentum by way of greater transparency and understanding of conflicting stakeholder needs. As important as the technology is, long-term success centers on the people and problem-solving within the organization.
Slowing down to speed up: Incremental IAM improves business outcomes faster
Here again there is the obvious improvement that emerges from the technology and implementation, coupled with the hidden benefit that emerges. The lure of augmented IAM is that modular, incremental improvements immediately add coverage in weeks instead of months or years. The unexpected benefit is that the cross-functional collaboration that naturally occurs as you augment a current IAM solution strengthens the entire IGA ecosystem. More seamless connectivity across IT, HR, and operations is a direct result of gathering system requirements across those internal organizations.
As on-premises and cloud environments are connected via augmented IAM, new bridges are created between IT rules, human resources information systems (HRIS), and stakeholder business needs. Beyond the data, the focus on individual IAM capabilities and components across IT, HR, and operations opens paths to more innovative and effective solutions.
A post-modern IGA approach bypasses many of the challenges of legacy systems and of high-cost, high-risk replacements and is architected to grow and flex in today’s dynamic marketplace. To learn more, read our whitepaper: How Post-Modern IGA Transforms Problematic Deployments into Breakthrough Outcomes.
References:
• Managing your external supply system for innovation, October 2019
https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/operations/our-insights/managing-your-external-supply-system-for-innovation
• IT-Business Collaboration Fuels the Future of Applications, July 2022
https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/it-business-collaboration-fuels-the-future-of-applications