Thursday, April 23, 2009

Can you teach a bear to dance?

Any of you Identity Management professionals out there probably know where I'm going with this. How many times have you been in design discussions with a customer and just cringed at what they were trying to do? Do you tell the customer they are crazy? Or do you suck it up and do your best to just make something work? Sometimes you don't have a choice, but one thing I've learned is that it is very important to make the key stakeholders understand that we may be able to teach that bear to dance, but it ain't going to be pretty and the bear might not like it very much.

Some people are convinced that if you can write code then you should not really have many boundaries. True, that if it's software and the APIs are available you can do just about anything. But that doesn't always mean it should be done.

Identity Management projects induce much change in an organization. Sometimes folks have a tendency to look for a way to code around having to ask someone to accept a change in their routine or what they know. This doesn't always work.

People, when rolling out an Identity and Access Management solution get ready to make a few changes in your life. New Identity? For sure. New Logon ID? Perhaps. New password? Likely. Single Sign On? Sure, but hopefully your not trying to make a bear dance. :-)