Big Sky Thinking

Better Decisions Faster


First Steps with Identity Management: White Pages

Identity Management solutions are very complex and require collaboration across organizational boundaries, IT systems, and networks. Often times, identity data is assumed to be of sufficient quality (see our Blog entry “The Five Elements of Data Quality”) to provision users automatically, define roles, and develop workflows. Unfortunately, this assumption is often false and has severe consequences on any value that you hoped to get from your IdM solution.

One recommendation that we typically make to organizations that are just starting to build their IdM infrastructure is to release a white pages application as their first step. While the value to the organization is often low, so too is the risk if the application fails. This “low value, low risk” approach does offer significant insight, and value, to a small group of concerned individuals: the project team.

One of the nice things about the white pages application is that you can open it up to your end user community for self-service updates. User attributes like Hiring Manager, Department, phone number(s), and job title can all be opened up for editing. End users can update their own information using self-service tools and publish that information to the directory.

From this simple application we get the following benefits:

  1. Visibility into all data stored in the directory
  2. Ability to troubleshoot the Identity Management infrastructure (connectors, schema, namespace, self-service tools) in a production environment and develop a data remediation plan
  3. Centralized tool to collect updates for user data
  4. Validation of user data against standards and business rules before publication to the directory and synchronization with other systems
  5. Improved data quality across all connected systems

Labels: , , , ,

0 Responses to “First Steps with Identity Management: White Pages”

Post a Comment

Links to this post

Create a Link