Again, been busy and lax about the old bloggin’, cause been getting quite a bit of feedback on the topic of ROI of Identity Projects. (Also spent some time debugging two of the entries that were blocking their release – turns out it was an entry in the summary field that caused the problem. Review the past entries to get the complete story.)
Presented the findings we have discussed in this blog with collegues and there is great interest in real world ROI of Identity projects. Working to get the model out; hopefully it will be something we can eventually publish for all.
Did get an interesting question from one of our partners – does this analysis work for smaller, mid-sized businesses?
As with all ROI analysis and budget justifications, the more users you can put into the denominator, the better the outcome of the model. Things work great when you spread a $2.5M project over 60,000 users (around $42 per user investment) versus a $1.5M project with only 8,000 users ($187 per user).
So this opens a new series of questions in this ROI area and the ability of smaller companies and organizations to justify provisioning and access control projects. Do the numbers hold up? Where can we drop costs to improve benefits? Can smaller organizations benefit from Identity projects as well as the Fortune 500?
The answer is yes, because we can drop the cost of implementation, both in licensing and deployment services. Consider going with subscription pricing – its based on the number of employees, so the fewer employees, the lower the acquisition costs of the software.
Smaller companies also have fewer systems and fewer provisioning policies than the big boys (at least the should or they should focus their current IT on simplifying their world). Much of the initial investment is to analyze how tens of thousands of users gain access to thousands of corporate sites. Service vendors should be able to bring “pre-built” processes into play, cutting down on the deployment costs in a simpler, less complex environment. It may seem counter intuitive to bring in a services partner, but they can greatly compress the amount of time needed to get up and running. I could paint my house, but it would take months and it is cheaper (if you include my time) to hire a painting crew to “get’r done”.
As the identity market matures (as all technology markets do), software vendors (including us) will have to address the SMB world with smaller offerings and more plug and play functionality. Good news is that plays well in this space; you would be surprised how much provisioning coverage can be accomplished just hooking up the HR system to Active Directory and a UNIX farm. We even have some larger clients where one platform (like AS/400) is very prevelant and connecting to that platform covers a lot of company systems.
So we will continue to work on the ROI models and methods, but will “open a branch of the code line” to consider a model for the SMB arena and see what that can bring to the table. The costs will most likely drop down to the per user costs the big projects bring to bear, but we should be able to get close.
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