Initiative GenericIAM has started successfully …

• In cooperation with Kuppinger, Cole + Partner and representatives from addtional 8 companies, of which some are well-known, we on Tuesday, April 25^th, 2006 successfully started the not-for-profit initiative GenericIAM for the definition of a generic process model for the Identity Management.
• The introduction of Identity Management requires the implementation of numerous administrative and some operational business processes. These processes have to be defined agreed enterprise wide, prior to any implementation and support by systems. According to common experience this step accounts for the by far larges part of the overall effort during the introduction of Identity Management solutions. There are examples known where in PKI-Projects up to 85% of the effort was caused by the processes.
• On the other hand through these multiple redundant process definitions in each enterprise numerous similar or even identical process definitions are created. The similarity of these processes in different companies is rooted in the infrastructure nature of the Identity Managements. Identity Management processes need to comply with the requirements of common good practise and security. Beyond that they are rarely relevant for the competitive position of the enterprise.
• Therefore the question arises "Why do we need to start with a 'white sheet of paper' again and again?" or "Why do we have to re-invent the wheel?". Shouldn't enterprises facing such a high degree of commonality better concentrate their efforts on the remaining differences and take the common processes as a standardised package of-the-shelf?
• We therefore took the initiative to initiate a task force to compile a generic process model for the identity management from all available sources. Through a successful Kick-off-Meeting on Tuesday, 2006-04-25 in Frankfurt we started the activities.
• Enterprises interested in participating in the task force, are invited to contact Dr. Horst Walther (horst.walther@kuppingercole.de).