While numerous regulatory and risk management drivers require organizations to deploy an Identity and Access Management (IAM) solution, IAM deployments are notorious for taking too long, requiring too much upfront capital investment and for being too complicated to adequately support after deployment. Still, IDC predicts the market for IAM worldwide to hit 4.8 billion by 2013. While IAM has earned its bad reputation, enough tribal knowledge exists that it really doesn’t have to be that way. Here are some of the main things to avoid:

1.Focusing on technology before business processes. IAM is far more than technology. In fact, many would argue that it is primarily about business processes. Yet, many times an IAM initiative is so heavily focused on products and automation that the underlying business processes are not given proper attention. In the long term, this often results in the project being deemed a failure, in great part, because all the technology is doing is automating broken processes. Check the other Top 10 Most Common Pitfalls of an IAM Initiative