{"id":1066,"date":"2021-08-30T08:13:00","date_gmt":"2021-08-30T08:13:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/identityandaccesssolutions.com\/?p=1066"},"modified":"2021-09-02T23:38:10","modified_gmt":"2021-09-03T03:38:10","slug":"setting-expectations-for-iam-deployments","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/elivebiz.com\/IAAS\/setting-expectations-for-iam-deployments\/","title":{"rendered":"Setting Expectations for IAM Deployments"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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Identity Management (IdM) is like most other technologies in which organizations invest to gain improvement. The initial purchase of a software license and downloading the bits is only the beginning of the journey. The tool must then be integrated into what is often a very complex environment. Then there are the people and processes, oh\u2026 and the training (\u201cWell, we didn\u2019t budget for all that.\u201d).<\/p>

A few decades back, I was working in my first official sales job going door-to-door in Pike County, Kentucky selling Bibles. I was in the middle of my third summer doing this illuminating endeavor when I found myself sitting on the front porch talking to a thirty-something year old man who still lived with his mother and weighed over three hundred pounds. I was showing him one of my products and said, \u201cNow if you don\u2019t like that, you don\u2019t like chicken on Sunday.\u201d That got us talking about food, which led to him describing the delicacies of his mother\u2019s biscuits. \u201cOh, they\u2019re something else,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019ll sit down and eat thirty of \u2018em in one sitting\u2026 now that\u2019s hiding \u2018em!\u201d<\/p>

I couldn\u2019t help looking at his girth and thinking, \u201cBuddy, you ain\u2019t hiding a thing. Those biscuits are THERE!\u201d<\/p>

There are some things that should be just as obvious to us in the technology space. In IdM, we often look at the license cost of a tool for Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) and think that\u2019s the majority of the budget needed. The reality with an IGA implementation is that we often discover significant additional costs with all the data sources, applications, and the human capital involved in defining the client\u2019s organizational processes and policies.<\/p>

To make matters worse, as IdM salespeople, we typically want to minimize the cost of services to the overall project so we can maximize our license fee and close the deal (no surprise, that\u2019s how we are paid). But once the client is in the middle of the project, the real total cost of ownership (TCO) naturally emerges and becomes glaringly obvious. Just like the biscuit man, it\u2019s a reminder that we \u201cain\u2019t hiding a thing.\u201d<\/p>

In full transparency, when I was selling identity access management (IAM) software as an individual contributor or if I was in an executive meeting for an IAM solution presentation, I cautioned my customers, \u201cThe license cost is only part of this project. As a rule of thumb, you should expect to spend at least as much for services, if not more. Sometimes it\u2019s double the license cost, depending on the complexities of your environment. Oh, and your people will need to be involved from the beginning because we aren\u2019t responsible for creating the policies and processes for how you grant authorization to an application.\u201d<\/p>

Are there project casualties in the technology and cybersecurity space? Not just those of hackers finding a successful attack vector or a new exploit\u2026 but of failed projects? I\u2019ve heard many stories.<\/p>

Earlier this year, I sat in on a project kickoff with our integration partner and their new customer. The client\u2019s Vice President of Engineering expressed concern over our project timeline. \u201cWe just spent the two previous years on an identity project that never went into production.\u201d It reminded me that simply selecting the best, market-leading software solutions is no guarantee for success.<\/p>

The last thing any leader wants is a failed project for lack of preparation or proper planning, which leads to unexpected costs. When that happens, there ain\u2019t hiding a thing!<\/em><\/p>

Give us a call or send me an email to learn how we help our clients (including some of the major integration players in the IAM service industry) create successful identity project deliveries that achieve all the timeline objectives – and stick to the budget with no surprises!<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Author:\u00a0George Miller, IAAS Vice President of Sales<\/i><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\"GeorgeMiller\"\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Identity Management (IdM) is like most other technologies in which organizations invest to gain improvement. The initial purchase of a software license and downloading the bits is only the beginning of the journey. The tool must then be integrated into what is often a very complex environment. Then there are the people and processes, oh\u2026 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1071,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1066","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ransomware"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/elivebiz.com\/IAAS\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1066","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/elivebiz.com\/IAAS\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/elivebiz.com\/IAAS\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elivebiz.com\/IAAS\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elivebiz.com\/IAAS\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1066"}],"version-history":[{"count":21,"href":"https:\/\/elivebiz.com\/IAAS\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1066\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1107,"href":"https:\/\/elivebiz.com\/IAAS\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1066\/revisions\/1107"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elivebiz.com\/IAAS\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1071"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/elivebiz.com\/IAAS\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1066"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elivebiz.com\/IAAS\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1066"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elivebiz.com\/IAAS\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1066"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}