Thursday, 17 April 2008

Enabling Organizational Agility

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In a recent customer meeting, our contact in Information Security had organized an audience that included a group that is responsible for translating business requirements into IT requirements, and communicating relevant cost/benefit details back into the business from IT. At many of our customers, this kind of group helps analyze the business impact of acquisitions and divestitures, as well as the cost/benefit of outsourcing non-core services.

The immediately apparent benefit (to them and us) of investing in a federated identity infrastructure (think of it as a lightweight abstracted integration layer between disparate businesses) was that they could pull time and uncertainty out of the process of putting together & pulling apart discrete businesses as the economics dictated. In other words, they need to be agile as an organization, and the federated approach Ping provides is not a nice to have, but a “must have” technology that helps them accomplish the goal of maintaining agility.

I guess this all makes sense. For organizations that grow through acquisition, or that are constantly spinning off various divisions, any time spent centralizing and consolidating your infrastructure works against the organizational mandate.

So, the question is, who performs the “Integration Services” function within any organization that is in flux (and who isn’t in flux these days)? We're working hard to uncover those groups in as many companies as possible, and to help those organizations understand the huge value-add potential from including Ping as part of their solution.