Monday, March 22, 2010

Microsoft Forefront Identity Manager Case Study

 We now return to regularly scheduled programming. Now that I'm back from vacation that is!

Microsoft Forefront Identity Manager User Cuts Costs, Improves Compliance, Lays Convergence Foundation

I came across this case study on LinkedIn and stopped to read it. The "cuts cost" words in the title caught my attention. I'm always interested in any case study that highlights how a company cuts costs.The folks at First American Title give a good overview of what they've accomplished with FIM 2010 but unfortunately the case study lacks background on the "cuts cost" aspects that were mentioned in the title. The closest I could get to finding out how the cut costs was the following statement:
We think we are probably going to be able to redeploy at least one FTE from what we do now to other things because we are automating this.
If you ever sat in front of a CFO - or probably an CxO - and said you'd save costs by "redeploying" staff you'd be asked if that redeployment was "out the door" because redeploying staff is not a way to cut costs unless they happen to be taking a salary reduction.

Either way, this is a good case study but I'd have preferred to understand how First American Title cut costs and what their ROI was.Perhaps Microsoft is in the process of publishing a more detailed case study.

2 comments:

Richard Blackham said...

More interesting I think than "cut costs" is the terminology around role management that has crept in...this is after all the first FIM 2010 public case study statement and it includes all the rhetoric some partners would very much disagree with, such as the role management claim. I can foresee a couple of very disappointed partners out there.

Dave Nesbitt said...

You do can simple role management with FIM. Extend the schema to hold a "role" object, give it a memberList multi-valued attribute and write a workflow to add users to the memberList. Presto! Then use the roles in your provisioning code to determine downstream application roles.