Don't lose sight of the plan

Didja see the Packers beat the Steelers? I'm from Chicago, so I had mixed feelings. But my gut feel was that the Pack making it there and winning it all was at least rubbing it in the face of Mr. Dirty Text-boy Favre.

What I thought was a terrible start, however, was the National Anthem. Christina Aguilera mucked up the words something fierce. It's kind of hard todo, considering there aren't that many lyrics. Maybe if she hadn't spent so much effort SINGING SCALES instead of SINGING THE SONG, she would have hit the target. And then the halftime show was brtually bad. There was so much production involved, they forgot the MUSIC. It's just like the infamous Janet Jackson halftime show. Even if you subtract the errant body part, it was still on its way to being known as the dumbest, lamest, sleaziest show ever, and not exactly a glowing recommendation for parents to get their kids into football.

Okay, okay, what's this got to do with IAM? Actually, it's relevant to any major project. If you forget the actual objective because you go down ratholes, you will NOT succeed. At my last cube job ever, we worked for literally months to convert from a mainframe system to a more nimble system. Months. Then on the projected cutover weekend, management decided to put us off another week and sneak in a bunch of other functionality. THEN they decided to also put off a physical inventory and hold that the same week as the cutover. UTTER DISASTER. It could not have gone worse.

I've also seen this happen during IAM projects. "We were starting with basic auth and SSO, but now one of the stakeholders wants to accelerate SAP integration. So we're tossing that into Phase One." Integrations are often a mess to begin with, so they should be taken as their own mini-phases.

I've always said that in any IAM project, authentication, SSO, and the most basic authorization should come first. They are the foundation for eveyrthing else you might do. SSO leads the way for integration with various packages, and it's also the platform for federation. Start with the end in mind, sure, but don't rush that start TO the end until you're ready.