Keep the project’s scope focused and take a phased approach for new initiatives. If not, you risk ailing — or face an implementation that may take years to complete. Ensure you structure the identity source for centralized oversight while engendering a sense of local ownership. You want to make sure that entitlement owners follow the approval process as well. An intuitive, structured process that provides enough contextual identity information to make intelligent decisions quickly prevents rubber-stamping.
2. Rightsize User Roles
If done well, role-based access control (RBAC) saves time and creates an efficient way to manage your user base. But, you have to start by cleaning up your application access first. This means working with Human Resources and other internal business units to do so. Get as close to a clean slate as possible, and be careful not to overengineer your policies. Otherwise, you risk becoming mired in layers of nested access roles — making it impossible to determine who has access to any given resource.
Sean suggests that organizations test their roles on a high-churn, task-oriented department, such as a call center, to generate actionable information on how effective they are.
3. Curate Metrics to Drive Efficiency
Sean recommends measuring what matters — and to avoid boiling the ocean. It’s critical to have the right metrics in place to measure success, so make sure they align with your strategic goals. This brings us back to the importance of best practice number one. When defining your metrics for success, it comes back to working with business teams. There’s a lot of value in their knowledge. They know how their part of the business needs to operate and what success looks like. Working with different application owners and business unit managers to define consistent, reasonable, and quantifiable metrics builds their investment in success.