Agenda

Some people say that technology has changed the way we did our business before. This is not the case. As an example we could look into financial business. The philosophy of that business has not changed for centuries. Introduction of technology made it possible to easily handle thousands of transactions with many clients. However the way of handling those transactions has not changed: we replaced paper ledger cards with electronic records. Computers are faster when calculating, storing and retrieving the records, but ... we still are not flexible when enhancements, new business ideas and new legal situations are introduced.

Why is it like this? We try to computerize what already exists. We keep our traditional "specialized" divisions, or silos. Each of the silos does what previously had to be done manually. Accounting is done by accounting, settlements are done by settlement group, payments are done by payments handling group, etc., etc. Our approach is to describe the work done within each of the silos and then we develop programs that mirror our manual work. The result is that our IT solutions are not flexible because they only represent a snapshot of our reality. Paradox situation is: our own IT world became entitled to be an additional silo!

Another question following the above mentioned issues is: do we develop IT solutions properly? Every couple of years we experience the next "holy grail" of IT. The new language, the new method, the new fad is going to cure our lack of flexibility. May be we also should start to reconsider how we make our application software. Is really the bespoke software development so expensive? Or is this word "expensive" just a myth.

Further issue of our silos automation is the provision of inter-silos communications. Suddenly, from information point of view, we add complexities to our systems and we start developing IT that has nothing to do with our business but secures inter-silo communication. We never try to consider changes in our organizations, we still want to keep status-quo with our silos and we believe that IT can help us to cope with the new sprouting complexities.

When could one say that IT provided the real competitive advantage? What about sustainable and flexible operations? One would have to consider changing organization, automating this new organization and working differently. Slight shift of conceptual paradigm of automating our business and creating application software might really open new frontiers of applying technology to doing our daily business.

The couple of final sentences will be dedicated to examples, experiences and recommendations.

If greater security, reduced cost, happier users, improved efficiency and less work sounds too good to be true, think again. Convergence can bring you all of this. What convergence? Convergence of access, both physical and logical; convergance of governance for data and access; and convergance of protocols, social and business, user-centric and enterprise-centric.

Cloud computing, social networks and enterprise collaboration demand federation of directory information across trust boundaries to create a distributed information fabric. Can these federations be built so as to be consistent with the requirements of minimal disclosure? Kim will frame the problems and introduce some ideas about how we might solve them.

A new generation of provisioning solutions is emerging, built on an identity governance framework and designed to address the compliance and governance challenges that provisioning could not. In this session, SailPoint CTO Darran Rolls will explain the evolving business requirements that have changed the nature of identity management, outline the technical limitations that make traditional provisioning solutions too complex and difficult to implement, and then detail this new, governance-based approach to provisioning. He will also discuss the benefits of implementing provisioning on a governance framework and will highlight how this new approach helps make identity management a business directive.

Security continues to be an afterthought as many organizations push full steam ahead to outsource core IT applications and functions to cloud service providers. Organizations must take a step back to master the federated security models and emerging tools applied at the network edge to avoid creating more security silos or proprietary approaches driven by each cloud service provider platform. The Six Sigma “Black Belt” skills are SAML, XACML, ABAC, WS-*, Delegated Authentication, Virtualization Security, and Middleware Integration. In this keynote, Gerry Gebel presents an organizational plan that follows a defined sequence of steps and creates a dashboard to monitor success.