In the old days, pre-Web(!), the cool kids who’d later grow up to computer hackers worked on cars. In listening to the funny and informative radio talk show “Car Talk”, I have often thought that the hosts Tom and Ray Magliozzi would be computer geeks instead of car guys if born a decade later. Certainly their rules apply to today.

The “Car Talk” show has reached the end of its run, in one of the last shows the hosts were reminiscing about how they used to open up their garage on the weekends and people could come in, use their tools to work on their cars. Tom and Ray started off each session with a series of rules saying essentially “you may think you came here to fix stuff. That is actually the third reason you are here. The first thing you are here to do is – not hurt yourself. (Lots of ways to do this in a garage full of heavy cars and power tools). The second thing you are here to do is – not break anything that’s not already broken (curse of the tinkerer). And then the third thing you are here to do is to fix your car.”

The distilled wisdom here is instructive to companies embarking on Identity and Access Management (IAM) projects.

Companies typically launch an IAM effort due to:

A) Architecture or design initiative for improvement

and/or

B) Compliance makes them

If you look at the number of products, protocols, and standards in IAM, its pretty staggering at first. Large vendors offer *dozens* of different IAM products. And all that is before you get to integration. The end result is that enterprise is left staring at a Chinese menu of options and all they can do is point one that they partially understand.

here the What Identity and Access Management Can Learn from Car Talk