In the identity and access management (IAM) market, we’ve got the terminology all wrong. With bad labels comes misdirected thinking, which ultimately contributes to project failure and disappointed stakeholders. This sounds like a big claim, so allow me to explain. Depending on what milestones you care to consider, the IAM market has been evolving for about twenty years. Perhaps it’s time for a reboot.

It began with moving identities and, in some cases, passwords out of the silos of individual applications and into a single directory. Organizations then discovered that one directory was an unrealistic goal and that moving the data out of the silos was not enough; the change management process must be consolidated as well. This is when the term “identity management” was invented, in reference to shared processes for managing identities. Meta directories (to synchronize data) and virtual directories (to present an aggregate view) appeared around this time, as did user provisioning in order to help manage those applications that still couldn’t leverage a directory. Read more here…