Does acquisition equate to evolution? Enterprise Role Management at a crossroad…

Blogger: Kevin Kampman

It’s stimulating to take a vacation and return to find that you’ve been challenged to weigh in on an issue. Late last year, Sun acquired VAAU, a role management and identity audit vendor. This followed Oracle’s acquisition of Bridgestream, another enterprise role management (ERM) vendor, earlier in the fall.

Ian Glazer posted a blog entry on enterprise role management asserting that these acquisitions would broaden the capabilities of the respective vendors’ identity management (IdM) suites, as well as raise the bar for other IdM vendors in terms of providing ERM capabilities. Since there are fewer ERM acquisition targets than IdM vendors, this promises to be an active area for development in the coming year, particularly as organizations recognize the value that ERM provides. Ian went on to question who in organizations really benefits from role management.

From my perspective, the administrative benefits of role management (efficiency and accountability) are derivative; the real benefits come from realizing new, structural perspectives on the organization. In an interview I participated in this week, I was asked about the return on investment from IdM. While there are tactical advantages to administrative efficiencies, what is more valuable in my mind and what I asserted in the interview is the potential “return on organization”.

The term “organization” can be viewed in two ways. From a static perspective, an organization represents an entity composed of people and their associated responsibilities, assembled to accomplish a purpose or objective. As an actionable term, organization represents alternatives for how people and responsibilities are structured to meet those needs.

While many enterprises follow similar structural patterns, any single enterprise is unique (by accident or design). Enabling that enterprise to understand and to refine its structure in response to changing needs is a longer term benefit of role management. Capturing that perspective in management tools is the immediate challenge, and provides the foundation to analyze and improve organizational structure. A short term benefit is the ability to leverage this knowledge to improve the administration and management of the enterprise.

In answer to Ian’s question, the entire enterprise can benefit from this return on organization. Some of this will be measured strategically, some tactically. The prerequisite for realizing these benefits is to capture and to populate the knowledge base.

With the addition of ERM capabilities, IdM can provide a more strategic and valuable contribution to the organization. The acquisitions by Oracle and Sun represent the impetus for IdM evolution, but only if these solutions are used as business enablers. Otherwise, we’ve just improved our ability to document and maintain the status quo.