Enterprise IDM: Introduction

13 Oct 2005 More than a year ago a project was started. It took year-and-a-half of pre-sales activities to get it started, but it was finally lauched. It was an Enterprise Identity Management project. Or more specifically it was only first part of larger IDM vision. But what was so unique in this projects that it's worth writing about it?

First of all we used new and exciting technology. The basic component was Waveset Lighthouse, now called Sun Java System Identity Manager. Great user provisioning product. The other components being Sun Java System Directory Server and home-brewed integration tools - all of them heavily customized to met customer's needs.

Then, it was the first complex IDM project in the Central/Eastern Europe. It was quite rapid (less than a year) and it was successful. Something not frequently seen in these longitudes.

And finally, I've personally drafted the first preliminary pre-sales concept, architected the whole solution, technically led the project, took the most difficult technical bits for myself to implement and watched the whole project till the very end. From my egocentric point of view it is The Project to be proud of.

But it is not the success of the project that I want to write about. I think that the problems that we encountered, the little failures and unmet expectations - these are the things worth noting.

In the next few blog posts I want to describe some of the key problems that were not apparent in the early project phases and that struck with hurricane-force in the most incovenient times. These are usually not technological problems, but rather "philosophical" ones, concerning solution desing, customer understanding and things like that. I workd on several other IDM-related activities since then and all these problems are apparent for other customers also. So I decided that it is worth sharing the experience. Maybe it can save you a lot of time.

Stay tuned.