Provisioning: Are Antacids on Your Menu?

Blogger: Kevin Kampman

At least three years ago, I spoke at Catalyst about provisioning solutions being ready for the mainstream. My optimism may have been warranted from a planning perspective, but the reality of adoption was still a speck on the horizon. Subsequent discomfort and difficulties have surfaced in our conversations with customers. 

One of the contributing factors is the gulf between customer expectations and product capabilities. I recently reviewed a “provisioning” RFP that covered a wider range of territory than the management of user entitlements. For example, role management was cited as a “showstopper”.  While roles are an element of identity management, we don’t see the management of business responsibilities as the domain of provisioning. While entitlement discovery and mapping is a desirable feature, role mining is not strictly a provisioning capability.

It is often difficult to distinguish broad identity management objectives from the capabilities of components like access management and provisioning. This is especially true when the outcomes are interrelated. Planners and implementers should exercise care to understand and establish these boundaries from the standpoint of dependencies, iterative refinement, and convergence. Role management and provisioning, for example, are complementary, but they involve different communities of users, analysis skills, information, processes and procedures, and can potentially clash if the deployments are closely linked.

At a more tactical level, identity management solutions represent a high degree of solution integration. We all know that the devil is in the details. This is especially true of provisioning, although connectivity with managed systems and the configuration of agent solutions has become more straightforward. With large organizations, these details encompass workflow, distributed platforms, transaction volumes, performance and tuning, audits and accountability. At a very basic level, the skills and familiarity of the implementers can make or break a project. The fundamental commitment of the vendor is also critical to the project’s success.

To get at the heart of these issues, this quarter we are speaking to organizations about their provisioning experiences. We have issued an electronic survey and are speaking to specific candidates about the details of their projects. As an outcome, we plan to develop a current view of what is working and where attention is needed. If you would like to participate, please contact me or analyst Lori Rowland.