Thoughts on Rapid Identity

An interesting quote I pulled off of Mark Dixon's Identity Trends Presentation from JavaOne.

“I have recently noticed customers more willing to adapt their business process to out-of-the-box capabilities and industry best practices. There seems to be a large shift in maximizing costs and conforming to standards based provisioning. If this trend continues to thrive, average implementation costs and maintainability will become more palatable for customers looking to get the most out of their phased identity deployments.”
- Robb Harvey

Well said. Also, here are some points from Mark:

• Template-driven rapid implementation methods will be used to reduce Identity Management
implementation time and cost.
• Best practices captured in rapid deployment tools will allow enterprises to minimize customization and increase system effectiveness.
• Rapid implementation tools will allow Identity Management systems to be deployed in smaller enterprises.

It's an interesting notion for business process to morph to templates. I recall when I first started in the identity space, that was the battle we would try to win. Never did though...business processes, however warped they might have been, would for the most part remain the same and we would architect the identity solution around it. Regarding the SMB market, I would have to agree that they are definitely more flexible...but the template approach is extremely difficult for me to envision coming to fruition. Even with our iRim product (Identropy Rapid Identity Management), our prepackaged workflows end up going through some rigorous tweaking before clients are happy. But I must admit that there is an inverse relationship between the size of our library and the amount of tweaking we do.