Software companies (rightly) emphasize the features and functions of their software.  Sometimes, however, the lost focus on implementation can be harmful.  As software becomes more feature-rich it inevitably becomes more complex.  This is not avoidable.  Having a sound plan for your Identity and Access Management (IAM) Solution deployment, therefore, is important to achieve project success.

The Spectrum of Deployment Scenarios

At Web Active Directory some of our customers purchase our software solutions and we don’t have contact with them from a services or support perspective.  Subsequently, they take the software, read the documentation, and go.  The software is installable with a minimum of steps.  After install, it launches and works immediately.  We do our best to provide documentation that supports this scenario.

More and more, we are seeing prospects who become customers that lie on the other end of the spectrum.  IAM solutions by their nature involve a lot of complex technologies and moving parts.  At Web Active Directory we make a strong effort to keep our feature-rich solution simple and understandable in the face of this complexity.  We see a lot of lean IT staffs out there where people need a good IAM solution but don’t want to read documentation or configure the solutions.  (Let alone to attempt scripting and coding or do data entry.)

Turnkey Solution

For these customers, we offer a turnkey solution.  In this case, we do the software install and configuration.  I think more importantly, many people when facing an IAM system deployment don’t necessarily know everything they want.  It’s common not to know what options there are for these solutions.  To remedy this, we provide questionnaires to serve as the basis for discussions that happen before the software is configured.  After the solution is deployed, we document and demonstrate how it was configured.  We believe that if our customers want to be self-sufficient, we should support that.  After this deployment must of our customers opt to be self-sufficient and configure the software themselves as needed.

Other customers fall between these two ends of the deployment spectrum.  We can give partial help in installation and configuration, for example.  When considering IAM solutions, it’s important to think about not only features and functions that you need, but also how much of a part you want to play in the initial deployment and configuration of your solution.