An Elevator Pitch for Identity Management
October 1st, 2008
It’s time to really launch this site and get blogging about Identity Management. To get things started, I’m trying to come up with a good elevator pitch for Identity Management. Too often I have to explain both what I do, and the industry I’m in. No matter what I say, as soon as I’ve uttered the words “Identity Management”, folks assume I work for a company that helps prevent Identity Theft.
Any thoughts on a good pitch? Put it in the comments. I’ll post what I come up with on Friday (and I might even “borrow” from some of your comments).
You help businesses be sure they know who is doing what with their computer systems. Doesn’t that roughly cover it?
That is certainly a part of it. It also includes a user’s identity life cycle within an organization, from on-boarding to termination. It can encompass automated provisioning based on a user’s demographics, to auditing of the user’s accesses, to simply syncing a user’s passwords (which typically is the only part non-technical folks understand).
I try to explain it by explaining provisioning (its benefits) and master password reset. The key points I bring up is:
*Streamlining all user accounts (anyone who has 10 sets of ids at their workplace can relate to the benefit of this)
*being able to do a master reset on pw (save IT staff time)
*Being able to disable all accounts in one shot thus securing data from those who no longer should have access
I guess this is all I retained from Ash’s explanations!
A decent way to start a non technical discussion is to talk about the user lifecycle. It’s chronological, it’s relevant (everyone has been through it), and it’s easy to understand. This explains half of the picture…it’s tougher to explain entitlements and federation using this, though possible