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Five Goals for Your Identity and Access Management Operations Software Factory: Part IV

By kumni04 posted Sep 27, 2018 02:21 PM

  

Goal #3: Developing Standardized, Reusable Components

 

In our journey so far, we’ve discussed how to achieve our first two goals in building an IAM operations software factory, simplifying application onboarding and creating an enterprise IAM framework. In this blog, I will cover goal #3—developing standardized reusable components.

 

Having standardized reusable components makes your IAM factory agile and efficient. However, since they are more complex than cookie-cutter components, standard reusable components require proper planning, strategy and investment in resources and funds. Surprisingly enough, many IAM stakeholders fail to leverage this goal—some are too busy meeting tactical objectives while others put it in a backlog that may or may not ever be acted on.

 

One thing is for certain: In a medium to large IAM operations environment, not using standardized, reusable components becomes very expensive in the long term.

 

So why not nip that expense in the bud? The sooner you get started, the more you’ll save. I highly recommend developing these artifacts and components in a reusable and extensible manner:

  • Design documents
  • Operations manuals
  • Integration modules
  • Data definitions
  • User interfaces
  • Business logic
  • Workflow
  • APIs

  

Once you take the plunge in developing reusable components, it’s important to adhere to relevant industry practices so that you meet corporate compliance needs across all facets of your organization. This leads us to create standards that all parties must follow to ensure optimal development and faster value realization for everyone involved.

 

Why are these standards so important? Simply put, reusable components without standardization lead to chaos when trying to achieve the desired outcomes: efficiencies, synergies and cost savings. And when you develop standards for reusable components, you’ll soon realize that your organization is growing in operational maturity.

 

Here are some examples of standardized reusable components. One is a generic five-step workflow with escalations and exceptions that can be used for all business processes, from the most simple to the most complex. Another is a standardized set of data and web services definitions that can be used to integrate business applications such as ERP systems and mainframe with your HR systems and CA Identity Suite. This can be done either directly or by using policies developed for CA API Gateway, thus giving you low-code reusable options for business process integration.

 

As I mentioned in my first post in this series, developing standardized reusable components is a tremendously useful capability to achieve and sustain. Think of it as creating a portal and enchanting your inventory items in Minecraft to defeat ender dragon. And once you’ve achieved goal #3, it will be so much easier to accomplish our last two goals: agile devOps and automation. Stay tuned!

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