Hey bartender, I'll have another (access permission)

Recently I was in Columbus for some meetings, and walked across the street from my hotel to a better hotel which was better because they have a bar. I sat down and ordered the local soda pop. The lovely bartender bartender tapped her touchscreen eight or nine times, then swiped her card through the reader, then tapped twice more. And only then could she pour me some pop.

This is a great example of poor usability. It shouldn’t be that hard to serve, uh, pop. Too many touches, taking too much time, and the more touches you need, the more likely you are to make mistakes.

Oracle Identity Manager 9.x was very good, very stable, very popular. When it was time to build the next version, Oracle brought in third parties, partners, field people (like me!), and others to beat the thing up for usability. One of the early reviews of the alpha was, “too many clicks.” It took too many touches to perform simple provisioning tasks. So the remedy for that was improvements to the UI as well as the logical flow.

Historically, various identity startups have had some very flashy GUI’s, but not a lot of muscle on the back end. Oracle has had less flashy, possibly clunkier front ends. But last year they released an excellent new interface, and have continued to upgrade it. Not only is there a powerful back end to handle a broad range of use cases, in large volumes, there’s also an interface that allows administrators to easily manage users, resources, roles, and the rules that match them all up. It also makes it far easier for end users to request and track new resources.

So the moral is, I want to get there from here, and I want it to be as easy as possible. And that includes getting access.