Processes of Identity and Access Management

Our GenericIAM group offers a diploma thesis, which is sponsored by NIFIS e.V. and supported by impulsIT and the Chair of M-Business and Multilateral Security (Frankfurt University).

The topic is: “Prozessanalyse im Bereich der Enterprise Identity Management Systeme – Analyse, Ableitung und Entwicklung einer Prozesslandkarte.”

Detailes about conditions and objectives were descriped on the homepage (in German) .

Last Friday our volunteers group met again in Frankfurt for the 9th quarterly meeting.

After a short introduction and welcome to our new members, the working groups reported their progress.
As modelling is our key activity, the modelling approach was debated intensively.
From start it was the main intention to collect all existing models and implemented enterprise processes trying to factor out a generic process layer. This bottom-up approach turned out to be not easy and offered some pit-falls.
In order to complement this approach and to create a more general “birds eye” view the group started modelling following a top down method.
Each method has its merits and its disadvantage:

• While the bottom-up way always maintains a solid foothold on proven real-world implementations it can on the other hand lead to arbitrary results in terms of naming folklore and physical artefacts.
• The top-down path however starts from a clear conceptual set of definitions and derives its conceptual framework by stepwise simple but compelling refinements. Especially due to its use of coloured Petri Nets it is however blamed for its theoretical approach; virtually incomprehensible for practitioners.

Both approaches are in fact meant to meet at common ground somewhere in the middle – on the “generic layer”. We hence expect to take the best of both worlds.
And the result has to be shown to the world. We hope to be able to do so at the 2nd European Identity Conference, starting April 22nd in Munich. You are welcome to visit us at our both there. – See you in April.

Same as last year we have a nice and beautiful booth on the second European Identity Conference 2008, in Munich (Germany). The booth is thankfully sponsored by the German NIFIS and KuppingerCole.
For more information take a look at http://www.id-conf.com

The location will be:

Museumsinsel 1 • 80538 München, Germany
Phone: +49 (0)89211 25170
Fax: + 49 (0)89211 25165
http://www.forumamdeutschenmuseum.de

Our goal is to create a best practice modell from a real enterprise landscape like we see it in many cases. What do need first? The idea how to create easy understandable workflows. We decided modelling event driven processes. The well known approach is a straigt forward method which often is used for designing business processes.

For that purpose we created shapes for Visio 2000/2002/2003 and 2007. From the IAM-Wiki an following links you can download the shapes and find some useful information to use it.

• http://www.iam-wiki.org/EPK
• http://www.iam-wiki.org/EPK_Modellierung
• http://www.iam-wiki.org/Prozessorientiertes_Identity_Management
• http://blog.doubleslash.de/2007/10/12/visio-2007-shapes-zur-prozessmodellierung
• http://blog.doubleslash.de/2007/03/01/vorlage-und-shapes-zur-prozessmodellierung-mit-visio

We like to invite you to attend our 9th regular quarterly GenericIAM meeting. We will meet Friday, February 8th, at the NIFIS in Frankfurt. We have scheduled the meeting from 09:00 to 17:00.

The location will be NIFIS e.V.
Hanauer Landstraße 300
Frankfurt am Main
Germany
Phone: +49 69 40809370
Fax: +49 69 40147159
Internet: http://www.nifis.de

Three new wonderfull blogs about Identity Management were announced a few weeks ago by the (in meantime) very popluar analysts Martin Kuppinger, Tim Cole and Jörg Resch.
Visit the blogs (and come back to this blog) under http://blogs.kuppingercole.de/

The strategic questions related to Identity Management are frequently repeated in every new project. Enough reason for me to write an article (in German) which gives answers to those people, who have to think in strategic dimensions (mostly CIOs).

1. When do we need Identity Management?
2. Which risks do we have today?
3. How mature are the others?
4. Why couldn´t we wait to the time we urgently need it?
5. What is different in IAM-projects?
6. What are the most common mistakes in IAM-projects?
7. Which objectives could we support ?
8. What is the most cost effectiv way for a solution?
9. Who supports the CIO?
10. What doubleSlash can do?

By the way: Corbin H. Links wrote a great post about the "Strategic System Idealism and Legacy Reality".

Today we added a nice widget on the right sidebar. Its called "Blog Rush" and is the new product from John Reese of Income.com. I found the hint to this widget on Infopirat.

How Does BlogRush Work?

Basically, you sign up for BlogRush, submit your blog in the proper category, and then add the widget. The widget shows 5 links to blog posts in your same category.

For every pageview you get, one of your posts will show up on another BlogRush widget on someone else’s blog. The other person’s blog will be in the same category as your blog.

Give it a try, embed it in your blog.

We like to invite you to attend our 8th regular quarterly GenericIAM meeting. We will meet Friday, October 12th, at the NIFIS in Frankfurt. We have scheduled the meeting from 09:00 to 17:00.

The location will be NIFIS e.V.
Hanauer Landstraße 300
Frankfurt am Main
Germany
Phone: +49 69 40809370
Fax: +49 69 40147159
Internet: http://www.nifis.de

On one of the experts panels on the 1^st European Identity conference in Munich this spring densely populated with high ranking and well respected experts I heard one of the experts mention in middle of a heated discussion: „What is the sense of a role model if when ever we complete an organisations role model and are about to implement it, the organisation has changed considerably meanwhile. “

Well “that’s real life” we are tempted to say … but wait a minute! Can this really be true? I remember a second quotation from the same event “Roles are the DNA of an organisation” stated Ron Rymon, the founder of the role engineering firm Eurekify.

O.k. if you consider any commercial endeavour as a mild form of sparsely ordered chaos, if you run a company merely ad hoc and a role model is considered as an unnecessarily rigid structure imposed on top of a fluid ecosystem, that reinvents itself at every very moment – ok, in this case forget about role models.

But what, when it comes to automation? Many, if not most, enterprises are now strained by global competition. A manufacturer in Pittsburgh or Gelsenkirchen may compete with one in Chongqing (重庆) or Poona where at least the labour cost are dramatically lower. One can imagine that besides dirty political tricks it may take some bit of innovation and automation to succeed in this battle field.

But what is automation? In order to automate an organisation you need to express it in a formal way so that it can be processed by machines or - more often - in a blended fashion by machines and humans. You need to formally document your policies & rules, processes and roles in a complete, consistent and machine readable way. Only then they can be repeatedly applied by those above mentioned processors.

Considering this scenario, how can the organisation have changed while the role model is still controversially discussed? No way! The roles are the organisation, or at least an important part of it.