Usually anyone who actually has to complete an identity project learns learns two key truths:
- There legacy identity data is a mess and many of the records are unmatchable.
- Matching and scrubbing these records is much harder than they originally thought. In the end, it involves a lot of manual, costly, time-consuming effort.
Here is a great example of advice from someone who has lived the problem. From Digital Identity World May 2005 Conference there was a session called the Provisioning Customer Deployment Panel. If you listen to this MP3 and go to about 22 minutes in the podcast when the Q&A starts, you will hear that Frank Ma from Petro Canada says:
“Data Cleansing takes a long time .. implementing the (identity management) product seems to be the easy part .. we thought that would be the hard part. This (data cleansing) has got to be the same problem for everybody else.” – Frank Ma, Petro Canada (starting at about 22 minutes into podcast)
The person who asks the question also agrees that it is harder to clean up and match credentials that implement the provisioning system itself. At the end of the podcast, Frank Ma re-iterates and urges people not to overlook this issue.
Listen to the tone in his voice. It is sound advice from someone who has gone before.
You have been warned. It is much harder than you think.
PS. The folks at DIDW have just released their latest conference proceedings which I will be reviewing shortly for mentions of the data matching problem. Stay tuned.
