A Practical Action Plan

As you contemplate building an identity process inventory for your organization, you may feel overwhelmed. Most organizations have no idea how many processes they perform and are often surprised at the size of the number. The good news is that you can often make progress on the maturity of your processes in a piecemeal fashion, making the task much easier to accomplish. In the last section, I said that tasks lead to processes. Tasks are also one of the keys to prioritizing your action plan.

As you look at tasks, try to identify those tasks that are causing the organization considerable pain, because they're not performed well or those that are costing a lot to accomplish. The processes associated with these tasks are where you should start. As an example, consider that task we mentioned in the last section: resetting user passwords. Most organizations spend a lot of money on help desk-supported password resets, and there can be considerable benefit from automating the processes that support this task.

As you dive into the processes surrounding password reset, you're likely to find that there's not just one process, but many. Furthermore, they likely overlap and compete with one another. In an organization at the ad hoc or focused levels, there will be multiple password reset processes for each system and application. Furthermore, the administration of these passwords will likely be manual, requiring expensive intervention by multiple administrators.

After you've ...

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