Close the Identity Loop – Remediate the Actual Problem

Tickets. So many tickets.

Some tickets are great. Tickets for a night at the hockey game, or the theatre, or to a concert. Good tickets that mean fun things are about to happen.

Not so great – IT tickets. These are tickets that mean “hey, here’s some work for you to do” or “here’s a boring, repetitive, important task to complete” or “here’s something we don’t know how to do, go figure it out and make it so”. Not nearly as much fun.

And yet, we have so many of them. The modern computing way seems to be: figure out what problems you have, and then make a ticket for that. Put it you’re your ticketing system (ServiceNow/Jira/ThatHomeGrownThingWeMade) and your job is done! Progress!

Of course, the job isn’t done, not by a long shot. It’s just that the tools we have – Orchestration, Governance, Workflow, Security – are all tools built with a specific purpose in mind. They’re really good at what they do. But they’re not provisioning tools, and for most of the problems they find, they can’t be made to close the loop and remediate the actual problem.

Organizational Blindness

It’s surprising how often organizations lose track of that important fact.  In so many cases, we buy a tool to address a specific problem and then we’re surprised when they don’t actually also do a whole bunch of other things.

For example, take Identity Governance. These are tools that are built specifically to address a core governance need: Access Reviews. Organizations need them, and once your company gets to a moderate size buying a tool for that is a sensible solution. However, governance tools are not provisioning tools, and I was reminded of that fact while on a recent call with a prospect. There I witnessed a very interesting but unfortunately quite common conversation.

We had their Identity team and their IT team on the call, and we were talking about their governance processes. One of the Identity folks chimed in and said that “they don’t need a provisioning solution – it’s already all done! We do our reviews, and after the reviews, the changes we approved are fixed. Why do we need provisioning?”.

There was a pregnant pause. Then their head of IT spoke up: “What do you mean, the changes are fixed? Each time you do a review, a river of tickets gets opened and my team works overtime to get them completed before the next review cycle. That’s why we’re talking about provisioning!”

This was unfortunately not a once in a lifetime phone call. We hear this pretty consistently, and it goes back to the fundamental challenge facing a lot of folks: they bought a tool to do something specific, like do Access Reviews, and then when they couldn’t get it to actually fix the problems it found, they created tickets.

So many tickets.

The Fix-it Solution

Governance isn’t the only tool to blame of course. So many processes in your business create tickets for other people to go fix. And the fixers (IT Operations) quite frankly can’t keep up. I had one client back in my governance days that was two entire review cycles behind – they were working on the tickets from the review-before the review-before the last review. Not good. So, what’s the solution?

Ultimately, organizations need a fix-it solution. Like the Easy button, only one that actually does something. And that tool needs to be able to pick up a ticket, fix it, and mark the ticket as complete – with as little (preferably zero) human intervention as possible. It needs to know when things work and when they haven’t, it needs to tell people where there are problems, it needs to write down what it’s done, and it needs to be flexible. Preferably it should be SaaS so solutions can be shared across the organization and have redundancy and scalability.  While lots of vendors would like to tell you that their solution does what you paid for and also does all of the provisioning too, we know that this isn’t real. It’s hard enough to get a product that does what it specializes in well, never mind one that does that and also provides an enterprise provisioning solution.

A Dedicated Provisioning Solution

So as you’re solving problems with single sign-on, compliance, organization security, and other identity-driven challenges, remember that when it comes to getting things done, you’re going to need a centralized, monitored, flexible, best-of-breed provisioning solution to go along with them. Then, and only then, will your tickets be more about your favorite sports team, and less about your least favorite tasks to complete at work. 

The Fix-it Solution

Readibots built their product to fill this exact gap. It is a modern provisioning platform that provides a SaaS solution to modern Fix-It problems. It allows you to automate tasks, integrates with your existing identity infrastructure, and provides the glue that extends the range of all your identity tools so you can complete your identity picture. They developed an Agile Identity methodology using the READI Platform to deliver value incrementally and immediately. Think of it solving problems one a time and freeing your team to focus on the bigger picture.