Digital Identity

Finding Identity Processes

Evaluating the maturity level of your identity infrastructure involves evaluating business drivers, processes, systems, and user understanding for each component. As it turns out, evaluating the processes will cause you to evaluate the business drivers, systems, and user readiness, so that's where we concentrate our efforts.

The first step is to perform an identity process inventory . Starting out, you may not have many of your processes documented, so you have to go search for them. This is where the business function matrix that we discussed in Chapter 14 comes into play. One or more processes support each business function. Depending on how fine-grained you got in your decomposition of functions, you may have to dig a little deeper or come up a few levels to get to the right level for finding processes.

Processes can usually be found by looking for tasks and then asking, "How does this task get done?" For example, asking that question about the task of resetting a user's password will lead to the processes that use and update identities.

If you're organization is operating at the ad hoc or focused levels in the maturity model, you'll find the processes completely fractured according to business function, because they will have grown up independently. As your identity infrastructure matures, identity processes will cut across multiple business functions.

This discussion of processes may not seem to concentrate enough on identity. Be careful not to just ...