Digital Identity

IMA Principles

If you just turned to this section from the Table of Contents, you might be expecting a list of important principles for creating an IMA. Sorry to disappoint you. Rather, this section is about creating your own set of guiding principles that reflect the culture and objectives of your organization.

As I described earlier in this chapter, we created a process for defining how we'd make e-government the standard way of doing business for Utah government. One of the most important things to come out of that process was a set of principles for e-government in Utah (see "Principles for E-government in Utah").

We created these principles using a facilitated process where over 100 people broke into smaller groups, brainstormed principles, and then chose the ones they thought were most important. We brought all those groups back together, had them present their results, and then the entire group determined a short list of seven principles that were the most important.

I'm confident that we ended up with a set of principles that represented the feelings of the business and IT leaders in Utah state government. Over the coming months, these principles served as a charter of sorts that we could refer to. These principles grounded the discussion in important objectives and kept it on course.

Building a similar list of principles for your IMA process will bring the people whose support you need together and make them feel like a part of the process and the decision making. You'll be ...