IDM Placeholder Blog.

I may post my observations over 10 years of living through the birth of IdM/IAM, calling on experience at multiple Fortune 50 companies, government entities and healthcare.

For the moment, let me leave this entry with a prediction I made about 2 years ago that seems to be coming true... almost as slowly as IdM became a recognized value to corporations:

"IT Departments" evolved from Accounting and/or Engineering departments in many major companies. They became responsible for what people slowly understood was a shared asset that was best managed as a unified infrastructure, rather than departmentally.

In the same way, "Identity Departments" will carve out a new evolutionary niche in the corporation (large organization) of tomorrow, as companies recognize the shared asset that is "Identity Data." It too is best managed, standardized, maintained and distributed as a shared asset that can be leveraged by all departments.

The single hardest job this group will hold is identifying and maintaining a library of data terms and standards... a data dictionary or menu... that ensures data is well defined across the organization and protected from sloppy data management practices. (I'll save a special post for a list of those!)