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A quite recent Burton’s research found that organizations that deploy provisioning products rarely achieve their objectives during the first project iteration.

While these provisioning projects address some important challenges, they rarely address all the initial expectations and, even if they meet their goals, they result in high maintenance costs and in the inability to adapt to changing needs also in organizations that are on their second or third iteration of a provisioning product deployment.

Provisioning deployments are usually multi-year, multi-phased, and expensive projects: most organizations have spent from three to five years for their provisioning deployment and are still going on and implementation costs average span from three to four times the product acquisition costs.

This bad common scenario is consequence that many organizations have gone through numerous iterations of their provisioning deployment: some organizations are on the second, third, or even fourth implementation attempt.

The participants in Burton Group’s provisioning research project each went through various phases during their provisioning deployment lifecycle, including:
Phase 1. Homegrown, do-it-yourself provisioning
Phase 2. Escalating the buy vs. build decision
Phase 3. Introducing a packaged provisioning solution
Phase 4. Evaluating what went wrong in past deployments and defining a plan for the future
Phase 5. Defining success and understanding that provisioning is a multi-year, multi-phased project

Obviously not every organization go through every phase but several pass through some of them and many iterate phases 3 and 4 by deploying and replacing the previous provisioning product. For each of these implementations lessons can be learned and key insights can be gained, but a lot of time and money can be wasted!
Ideally, an organization deploying a provisioning technology should move directly from phase 1 to phase 5 without the costly experiences of phases 2, 3 and 4.

Unfortunately, organizations find that provisioning technologies were much more complex than expected: provisioning solutions are complex and cannot be simpler because of the complexity of business processes that are being automated.

Implementing a provisioning solution requires a diverse set of skills, including knowledge of individual applications, integration skills, project management and process and business expertise, as well as strong communication and political faculties. Because of the lack of these skills, almost all organization require the services of third party experienced professionals with specific knowledge and experience on provisioning applications and their integration components.

Therefore, even if the cost for external services is a significant element of the overall project, the expertise of few but well selected professionals can support your organization through the shortest and simpler path towards a successful provisioning deployment project.

Tags: burton, consulting, identity management, identity provisioning, project management

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This entry was posted on Monday, December 7th, 2009 at 9:49 am and is filed under Identity & Access Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.