Lessons Learned in IAM Program

Editor’s note: Ashley Stevenson, Identity Technology Director in ForgeRock’s office of the CTO, and head of our Federal business unit, was a panelist on the Federal Executive Forum radio show in late 2015. He appeared on the Identity & Access Management In Government Progress & Best Practices panel alongside execs from Dell, Symantec and immixGroup, and officials from the Department of Homeland Security, Department of Defense and the NIST. We’re running excerpts from Ashley’s remarks alongside clips from the show. Here's the fourth clip:

Lessons Learned in IAM Program

I think one of the things that we’ve heard here, a part of this discussion, is that identity moves from being compliance driven to driving the key values of the mission and that’s simply because the scope of identity is broad and it’s continuing to get even larger with connected devices. So I think one of the lessons there is that there is value to be presented around identity to all the different executive audiences, and there’s a need to clearly present the value of identity to whoever your audience is in the language that they understand. So there’s benefits to be gained from identity that a CFO cares about from a financial perspective, from auditability and traceability. And there’s value to be gained from identity for a citizen, customer-facing perspective for making their experience and consuming a digital service easier and more transparent, but yet still more secure, but that security being transparent. And of course there’s the value that identity brings from adding security to the internal enterprise and helping to mitigate insider threat, whether intentional or unintentional, so when you are presenting inside of your organization, inside of your agency, the value of identity is presented in terms that your business audience understands depending on who it is. And then the second thing is, don’t wait for perfect to get started. There’s so much that you can do inside of your agency before you get the big chunk of funding, before you get all of that progress. Build relationships and build an alliance inside, and do what you can with what you have so that when the pieces do come together you’re ready to execute.