IAM project painpoints

In my experience IAM projects generally have severe pain points in three areas:

1. Processes
2. Data
3. Technology

On the processes side it is often unclear if the new system should reflect how things should be done or how things are actually done. You also have the built in conflict between operations (things should be done as simply and straightforward as possible) and audit/compliance/security (the processes should provide adequate
safeguards). One safe way to fail an IDM project is to not get your processes defined and accepted by the key stakeholders at an early stage of the project but rather discover this issue during UAT.

If your data is dirty it doesn't really matter how good your provisioning and/or access logic is. Data ownership is often a huge issue as the owners, if they even exist, usually are blissfully unaware of how bad the data actually is. Data issues are interesting because there are lots of different kinds of data problems. In some cases the data lacks clear referential integrity between different systems which will hit you during initial load. Another data issue that may surface if you use user names to generate things like logins and email addresses is that names can cause problems. In many cases you need a reporting structure to be able to communicate to the users manager. If you don't really know who the manager is, which isn't that uncommon among contractors then you will have a problem.

Finally the technology part is about having a vendor that has experience on not only standing up the technology in itself but also to integrate it with the target applications. It is not uncommon that you spend 2-3 weeks on implementing the technical part of an integration the first time you do it while it takes you 2-3 days (or even 2-3 hours) the second time. Experienced high quality technical resources are key to have a quick and efficient implementation but right now there are many more projects than qualified engineers and architects.