Identity Management Business Drivers

As analysts of Identity Management, we actively join discussions about business drivers – and the resulting business values – of Identity Management. The interest in this subject also becomes manifest in the numerous related requests we receive. The problem gets more transparent when we consider it from the stakeholders´point of view.

We could also put it this way: Everybody needs Identity Management. But not everybody is aware of this. And above all, not everybody is able to identify what he needs as Identity Management. Basically, we can differentiate between three groups:

• IT executives in enterprises
• The non-IT management in enterprises
• The end user

These groups are not homogeneous. Within the enterprise IT for example, Identity Management approaches should concern persons in charge of Identity Management, those in charge of IT security, application architects and those who take care of enterprise portals – just to mention some of them.

The Non-IT Management for instance comprises the Audit Department or the Financial Department, whose job it is to meet the Compliance requirements, the top management seeing to Governance, or the Marketing Department with its CRM systems as one of the largest Identity Information repositories of the enterprise.

Taking the perspective of the end user, it is above all the own identity that matters. In the enterprise, the user mostly needs more than one identity for authentication, the same is true for the Internet.

Regarding the different interest groups helps to understand that the drivers of Identity Management and the terms used are just as different and varying. The actual link between them is the Digital Identity – of employees, customers, business partners. A CRM stores information about a customer or, to be more exact, a digital representation of this customer. For CMR, Identity Management is getting more and more important when it comes to merging the identity data of customers as well as permitting an easy access. This will push the support of technologies like OpenID and CardSpace.

In this connection, we might speak of CRM-driven Identity Management, although a CRM business officer will hardly recognize that this has something to do with Identity Management. He rather looks at it as a challenge associated with his job of handling the Digital Identity of his customers. But recognizing the advantages such as an overall view of all information about the customer, easy customer access to the enterprise involving a tighter link to the customer, he will understand and probably agree that the issue is relevant to his work.

Similarly, we may look at the other stakeholders and define the importance of Identity Management, drivers and resulting business values from their point of view. In some cases, we might take a rather technical view and speak of Identity Management, in other cases, completely different terms might be more suitable.

What are the consequences of all this? – I think we should diversify our perception of the technologies of Identity Management and the digital identities and develop different views if it, depending on which stakeholder´s perspective we adopt. This implies that not only Identity Management, but also the specific business challenges of each stakeholder are well understood. And in the end we will find that it is not an unsolvable problem to define business drivers and business values and to promote Identity Management projects – and last not least gain the budgets involved.

For selected IT areas, we will publish a series of reports dealing with this approach.