Digital Identity

Creating a Vision

The first step in the initiation phase is to create a vision for what the IMA will accomplish within the organization. Creating the vision requires more than simply writing the vision down, although that's certainly necessary. Creating a vision is a collective effort among the people who will have to buy off on and participate in the IMA activity.

The first step in creating the vision is for the enterprise leader (perhaps the CEO or the CIO) to establish the need for the IMA and to issue a challenge to the organization to create one. The challenge should spell out, in high-level terms, the objectives that the IMA activity is meant to accomplish. For example, the objectives might be:

• Protecting critical business information assets through the proper use of digital identity

• Enabling business interactions with partners and suppliers

• Understanding our customers better

• Supporting safe access to critical information and processes by customers, employees, suppliers, and partners

• Building a digital identity infrastructure that is flexible and agile

These objectives should be placed in a charter that is communicated widely within the enterprise, both to business and IT units.

After communicating the charter, the next task is to develop a "straw-man" vision that describes a target digital identity infrastructure fulfilling business goals and objectives in a generic way. The following are specific steps you can take to help create the straw-man vision:

• Assemble background information ...