The Situation

One of the world’s leading retailers, with well over 300,000 employees and thousands of stores around the globe, the company also provides additional services beyond retailing, including pharmacies, health clinics and financial services. Due to the nature of the businesses it maintains, the company experiences a high volume of employee turnover, especially during holiday seasons. This fact, coupled with a continuing aggressive growth strategy resulted in a very pressing need to strengthen its IT-security related identity management strategy.

The Task

In order to establish and document comprehensive requirements, I worked with a ‘core team’ from the company’s IT and architecture group to identify a broad group of business and IT stakeholders across the company to interview. After interviewing nearly 50 stakeholders, I developed an overview of the Current State of their IAM infrastructure and key supporting processes. From this, I established a Gap Analysis between the current state and the key business drivers and functional requirements captured during the interviews. Using the Gap Analysis as input, I established a Future State Architecture and Strategy, including a roadmap to help the company begin deployment based on risk, market demand and other criteria specific to the company.

The Action / Approach

The recommended architecture and migration strategy incorporated the input of several key corporate IT infrastructure and application groups across the enterprise. The key business objectives and technical requirements for enhancing the existing identity management infrastructure were captured from this input. The resulting deliverable also included initial recommendations of the vendors and their products that may support the recommended architecture.

The primary objectives of these actions helped the customer:

  • Provide material to improve documentation and save time
  • Gain insight and guidance to improve personal brand and reputation
  • Anticipate challenges or likely blockers to work ahead
  • Help drive consensus of opinions
  • Ensure alignment to good practice and compliance of standards
  • Provide rapid access to expertise
  • Identify opportunities to reduce spend and introduce opportunities and efficiencies
  • Give industry wide perspectives and enlightenment

 

The Result

The proposed conceptual identity management architecture positioned the Retailer to significantly improve the level of service it provides to internal and external users of its IT infrastructure, while maintaining security and audit-ability in an ever-expanding security and access control environment. Value was delivered by helping the customer:

  • Make more informed, data driven decisions
  • Reduce risk of fines, theft and reputational damage
  • Enable better business agility

These valuable benefit salso helped the customer relieve key pain points, which included:

  • Lack of strategic alignment across lines of business
  • Lack of asset management
  • Lack of budget

 

Focus In On: Responsible for Cyber Security / CISO

New Areas of Value:

Make more informed, data driven decisions

Reduce Risk of fines, theft & Reputational Damage

Enable Better Business Agility

Lower Perception of Risk from Customers

Improvements around:

Lack of Strategic Alignment across Business

Lack of Asset Management

Lack of access to relevant expertise

Lack of Budget