Tag Archives: workflow

Identity Orchestration, Integration, and Vendor Count

If you come from the musical world rather than the technology world, then “orchestration” suggests a collection of instruments, such as the Bucharest Symphony Orchestra (CC BY-SA 4.0 for those keeping score).

But in the technology world, “orchestration” knits different applications together. As far as I’m concerned, the most notable example is identity orchestration, the topic of a recent Biometric Update post by Chris Burt.

Different apps, different identity systems

I won’t go into Chris Burt’s identity orchestration examples from Ping Identity and Strata Identity, but I’d like to delve into a Productiv survey cited by IBM.

“According to one report, the average business department uses 87 different SaaS apps. These apps often have their own identity systems, which might not readily integrate with one another. As a result, many organizations deal with fragmented identity landscapes and awkward user experiences.”

It’s tough enough to get a bunch of different apps to work together. It’s even tougher when each of those apps has its own identity system, which may be incompatible with the identity systems from the other apps.

You can’t get all your SaaS apps from one vendor

How do some SaaS vendors approach the problem?

By telling you to buy a single multi-functional solution from them.

The only problem is that for medium and large organizations, no single vendor can provide ALL the functionality the organization needs.

So you STILL have to stitch things together.

Because identity orchestration, unlike musical orchestration, is not under the direct control of a single conductor.

Mickey Mouse and Leopold Stokowski. From https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxNZg1WyeVI.

(Past illustrations) Improving a physical workflow

(This past illustration describes something that I performed in my career, either for a Bredemarket client, for an employer, or as a volunteer. The entity for which I performed the work, or proposed to perform the work, is not listed for confidentiality reasons.)

By Paweł Janczaruk – received by e-mail, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15446830

PROBLEM

In an unused conference room, a company had multiple stacks of pages that needed to be collated. Each person had to visit each stack, in order, to collate the documents. Because of the arrangement of the stacks, it was taking forever to collate the documents.

SOLUTION

I recommended that the stacks be arranged, in order, on a table. Each person would then walk around the table, deposit the collated document at the end, and simply walk around the table again and assemble a new document.

RESULTS

The documents were collated much more quickly.

When the entity was able to designate its own dedicated workspace, replacing the unused conference room, the workspace was designed with tables at the ideal height to assemble documents.