Welcome to the identity at the center podcast.
This is the first of what we hope will become a routine.
Look at the world of identity and access management.
My name is Jeff Stedman and I'm here with Jim McDonald.
We're both strategic identity and access management
Consultants with a denture peas, advisory practice, Jim and I
have each been in the eye in space for over 15 years and have
been in the trenches of real-world identity management,
programs appointments and operations as far as my back.
Around you know I've worked for several large companies running
I am operations globally. Jim don't talk a bit about your
background. Sure hi everyone.
Jim McDonald year. I joined the dish would be seven
years ago and I've been in the advisory Services Group, as well
as I started and ran the forgerock practice for a while.
For drock is a I am vendor focused on external identity and
access management. I really that's kind of my area.
Our Specialties. So, my first I Am project was
focused on as actually. One of the manufacturing company
was responsible for the dealer portal.
So it's kind of a web server and web application guy has more on
the technical side of the house but I was transitioning in my
career into getting into more project management program
management. The time I was just getting
started with getting my MBA at Rutgers University.
I shot out there and, you know, I got this opportunity to take
our dealer portal and expanded across multiple brands are
taking a bunch of different web applications that were used for
doing business functionality, like ordering and ordering
complete machines and parts and submitting warranties and things
like that and had to pull it all together into one portal.
We had our dealerships across the United States and Someone
somewhere outside the United States and made a lot of these
applications that some users would have accounts and all the
different applications with different usernames, some things
like that, our drive to start with was to get to one ID and
password per person and that's a bigger challenge than you.
Then you realize when you start going down that road.
And so that's how I got into identity and access management
because we came to find out this is Is actual space.
You know, this is something that people are creating solutions
for, and maybe that's Captain Obvious today.
But 15 years ago, it wasn't at least for me.
So, that's how I got into the space and I always say, you
know, everybody's got their own story, how they got into, I am,
you know, most of us stumbled into it.
I doing some other job and then found that hey, we're all of a
sudden, I Am project and got into it at the right time there
or even today. I think you know this is some
depending on where you are in your career if this is like an
area that you're looking to get into, it's something I think
that pretty much anybody with a business background or technical
background can get into I am and just you know everybody has
their own career pathway. I think in this space You know,
it's interesting is that so I was at the end of verse
conference, this past week in Washington DC and whenever I'm
in the process of writing a Blog article about this, but it's
funny that you mentioned, how you got into I am because I
don't know anybody who got into. I am starting with I am, right?
I mean, they started maybe on the network side or help desk
side like myself. I started helpdesk kind of move
over to and and ID administrator and before moving in.
Yeah, man. At, but it's I don't know
anybody in the I am space that started and I am.
Do you know anybody that fits that bill?
I can think of one person which was Mario dousai who's now with
see we transmit security now. Yeah, I think so.
And yeah, he was a developer, we brought him in and for the bank
that I was working for, we brought him in as a developer
and that was like five years. To go and that's what I think
the you know the my answer your question was 10 years ago, the
answer would have been no. But I think more and more now
it's like I am spaces has gotten so big and we one of the things
that we are always talking about is, you know, the need for more
talent to get into this, into this area.
And I think I am is now in the place where it's like, you know,
what kind of a cottage industry where we have to go out and Take
people who nests don't necessarily have the skillset
you know, people fresh out of college and get them into.
I am another example is Fletcher, Eddington from our
company, he was hired as an intern and use doing technology
deployments in the imc's and now he's on the sale side but he's
built his entire career around I am.
So I think it's more of a kind of a recent phenomenon.
May be within the past five years, Maybe a little bit more
but if you know, people who've been in the space for a long
time, most of us kind of stumbled into it one way or
another. Right.
Yeah. It's interesting.
You mentioned the intern thing. It when I was at the conference
and we were having a an ID Pro organizational, meeting kind of
a get-together meeting, IE drinking at a bar, and we're
talking with a couple of folks from IBM and actually have a, an
intern kind of process. Well, they'll bring people Lynn
and have them kind of work around the different engagement.
Not engagements. I like different apartments in
the. I am kind of Consulting that
they do and they're trying to get more younger Talent, you
know, into those groups as well. So they actually have a
dedicated program to find those people get them exposure and
kind of help them figure out where they are in space.
They might fit if they sit right?
They don't, you know, they kind of move on but they're a big.
Company and they're looking to get support and, you know, from
a talent perspective and actually have a kind of Dicky
program, which I thought was pretty cool.
And it's probably as something, I would imagine lends itself
more to the Consulting space, right?
Bringing in folks and trying to get people my email, I don't see
you. I can Enterprise bringing people
in and letting them kind of figure out where they want to
be. You have to that level but you
know those Folks at some point end up in the industry.
I'll be probably. Yeah, almost You know, one when
I first got into it about 20 years ago, there were a lot of
different ways you could get into it and kind of build a
career. So there was, you know, you
could be a network engineer, you could be a server engineer,
things like that, but a lot of those spaces have become
commoditized and they didn't, you know, smaller companies,
mid-sized companies just Outsource server hosting or Or
network network setup or voice over IP phones, you know, phone
systems. That was another entry point
into it back in my day. But, you know, today there's
fewer and fewer those, they're being commoditized and, you
know, not necessarily moved out of the United States, but in the
bigger companies that I'm sure they have internship programs
and things like that to get into as well.
But I am is been one of those spaces where It's evolving so
rapidly and a lot of small companies move into the space
and it gives opportunities for newbies or new people to move
into the space and really build a career.
And one of the things that I've always loved about I am, is that
the people who I think are the most successful have, you know,
really good business skills. But enough technology skills to
be dangerous or vice versa, they've got really good
technology. Skills and they understand
business. Just enough to be dangerous or
obviously, if you're, if you're really experience with.
Oh, that's great. But you're solving business
problems with I am, you know, you're really having to look at.
How do you do things today? How do you want to do them
compare that with how to software work out of the box and
having the business sense to know that you don't want to take
something that you bought that works out of the box and
customize the, you know, customize it too much.
And then Start with kind of a Frankenstein system.
Yeah I mean there's so much more to I am than just technology
right? I mean it's there's there's
management, there's marketing, there's you know, communication,
relationship building, there's all and I think maybe it's not
clearly obvious, unless you've been in the space for a while,
it's not just knowledge musician.
You know, I don't consider myself overly technical.
I know enough probably the dangerous, but I'm not going to
go out and, you know, write your code and, you know, install and
configure your system. But I certainly understand, you
know, the macro Concepts, how things are gonna work together.
How does this work in the real world that, you know, large
companies and change boards, and software review, boards and kind
of all the company governance, the tends to go around, you
know, big projects. You know, how to Market out
there and you know why things I always say during our
engagement, Right. Is, you know, from a program
manager perspective, have your job is out there doing diplomacy
kissing babies, right? Nicky relationships.
People making people aware of one of the services that you're
offering. So that's probably a topic that
will Maybe cover in a future. You know what?
Makes good. I am program manager.
I think that's an excellent topic.
May be good on the right Road at some point.
So what are we want to talk about today?
I think what we should try to cover today is something that's
kind of near and dear to what we do because we can discuss them
and based on a real world experience.
But putting together an IM strategy and, you know, with the
role that you and I are in it just to be clear to everybody
what we do is were the advisory Services cement, I'd entropy.
So, we parachute in with our clients who are kind of come To
the realization that we need. And I am strategy and then they
had some point. Discover we don't know how to
make an IM strategy. So I think we could talk about
your the framework that we follow and kind of the process
that we go through. Because I know every
organization on a real, I am program manager can afford to go
out and bring consultants in and help with the process, but I
think the process is something that anybody could take on and
there might be some folks. There who are interested in just
kind of understanding what we do and how we do it.
So what I was going to kind of talk about was our framework
and, you know, I really like to break down what we do into three
major parts, so it's assess recommend and roadmap.
And so let me go through those three parts and and break them
down further. But the assessment phase is
really Understanding how things work today and I think this is
important to understand where your starting point is and
really it's it's going to help you develop kind of where we're
at today and what we want to accomplish which is going to be
that recommend phase and then realizing the amount of work
that needs to happen to go from point A to point B.
So normally with the assessment where we started, as we do a lot
of we do, ask Finger exercise. So we call it as our put chart,
the put chart is essentially processes user types and Target
systems, the whole idea and why we do that is to go through what
is the scope of the? I am program because I am can
mean many different things to many different people.
But if you get an exhaustive list of like, here are the
processes that we want to go after whether it's things
related to managing privileged identities.
User onboarding user off-boarding authentication into
applications, whatever it maybe it's not all those things.
Maybe it's you know just password management and it's a
more finite scope but realizing what your scope is, kind of the
starting point and one of the great things that comes out of
that exercise is that as you go through something like who are
the user type. So in other words we're the who
are we doing these? I am processes for, you're going
to So here are the stakeholders that we need to get involved.
We're talking about external customers.
For example, we need to get people who within our within our
organization is respond, are the person who's responsible for,
you know, communication to those users, things like that, who
provides them support. And other words, when a user
runs into an issue where they turn only, that's the service
desk, talking about employees for probably giving HR and
involved, if them As we go into Target system, this ASAP or
Salesforce is on the list. Well, we need to get people
involved from from those stakeholder groups.
Now, all those people that we identified, we then want to get
them involved in a workshop and a workshop would be, you know, a
series of meetings, where we understand from, folks.
What? You know, how do things work
today? What's working?
Well, what's not working? Well, what ideas do you have for
how to make? Things work better.
And so that's kind of the starting point is, I guess to
break down the assess phase. Its, you know, identifying
scope, identifying stakeholders and then meeting with the
stakeholders going through the workshop activities and that
might be a future podcast, as well as like what are these
workshops look like? How do we structure the workshop
sort of the questions but what I like to do in the workshop.
So way I like to see workshops during this for them to be very
interactive. It's not for us to kind of be
interrogating or just asking one way questions and just taking
notes. So the more that we're
interacting and white boarding or going through diagrams and
process flow charts the better and then coming out of that and
kind of the reason we use the term assess is that some things
are going to jump out at you right away.
Like you know this process is broken or this process works
really well is the strength within the organization is a
weakness, want to make sure we die.
Come in all those and then kind of be able to tell the story.
You know what is it that needs to improve?
What are the drivers for this program?
Why is it important to do something?
So I don't know. What are your thoughts on that,
Jeff? Yeah, yeah, that's right on.
I think one of the things that typically ends up being with the
hardest parts of the engagements that we work through, with our
customers is trying to get that attendance.
Right? For those workshops and having
people be available, It is an investment of time, right to get
those folks in there, but it's certainly beneficial, you know,
definitely for the customer and definitely for us, they will
understand. Well, how does it really work
today, right? Because you can have things that
are written down on paper and processes Etc.
And that's great, but that may not actually capture what's
really happening, right? So if we can get folks in the
room you know set up a safe space, right to have those
conversations and and figure out, you know, how do we solve
some of the issues that we hear at?
UPS out quite a bit. You know, when you talk about
the assessment, I always find interesting and I know we both
asked this question a lot, you know, from an assessment
perspective, you know, are we right on, you know, do they
does, the does, the customer agree with us or do they have a
different perception? So it's always interesting to
kind of have that conversation. So, yeah, we knew that we
weren't doing so great here. And, you know, that's, that's
kind of what we're expecting. I don't think I've ever come
across one. Where, you know, we've done an
assessment. Aunt and provided, you know,
here's why we think your ex and the customer saying, well,
you're totally wrong. This is why.
We're we're so much better than what you think, right?
It's we're usually pretty right on with that.
I don't know if you've ever encountered that from an
assessment perspective, but I think companies kind of break
you to brace themselves for the worst and maybe some tens or
pleasantly surprised or, you know, they agree with the
assessment. But I've never seen the opposite
where they thought they were doing a lot better than you.
Maybe what they really were. I've done, I think you're right
on with that point. I think you're right on with
that point. One thing that I are two points
that I wanted to throw out there.
One is this my perspective is like this is your strategy
because a lot of times will and so that drives a certain
perspective well you don't need to know every iota of detail or
make a strategy. You need to know we're going to
give areas of improvement, you know?
If the the way Passwords are managed is a problem.
You don't need to know every different aspect of the password
management policy or, you know, from a strategic perspective.
If you know that the tool is the problem, the tool needs to be
replaced, then that really ought to drive the strategy.
So you don't want to get burdened with too much detail.
And I think a lot of times in the projects that we've worked
on some of our clients. Thank you guys are here.
You need to know every detail we need to meet Every stakeholder,
anybody who has anything to do with passwords, and it's just
not the case. The other point I wanted to
bring out is that, you know, we talked about it as a workshop
and, you know, at least from a denture, we perspective, these
are engagements. So we're going in and, and we
want to try and get all of this information in a week.
So we try to schedule all the meetings in a week.
I feel like if our listeners are going out and trying to do this
on their own, Own. They should take that same
perspective. If you spread these meetings out
over several weeks or much worse of several months, you're going
to lose momentum, I'll get it done.
You'll never get it done. You'll forget things.
So it's going to be one more person to talk to, and it
doesn't create an event. It doesn't create, like, one of
the things I think about when folks hire us is that the
Consultants are coming in? They're going to be here this
week. You need to be ready, right?
Yourself available, right? Yeah, make yourself available
going to do one off exceptions. You can do a phone call next
week. If you can't be there, you're on
vacation or whatever. The reason is, we don't let it
drag out three weeks. It's kind of like if you can't
talk for three weeks, your perspectives not going to be
included. And you know, I don't mean to be
so harsh and you know, you don't really need to be that harsh,
but if you have several groups or saying like yeah, you know,
if it's just not important enough for them, that's a bigger
problem. And so that that is it to me as
like you've got to kind of create an event, you've got to
have these be a sense of urgency around it, right?
I mean, what's perfect. Let's get people in the room.
Let's get this conversation. We know it's an issue.
We've got these, you know, high-powered Consultants coming
in. You know, what's take advantage
of their time set aside the time to so we can get this done.
That's typically why I think it's why the hardest parts right
trying to get those folks to buy into that?
Says get availability, you know, the bigger the team, the bigger
the number, or larger number of stakeholders, just becomes that
much more difficult. So, the other thing to think
it's, we try to keep it more core and bring in other folks as
needed that sometimes can help with that as well.
Because most companies they typically have like a core kind
of I am T whether or not, they're truly a team or not, you
know. There's, there's typically a
handful of people really know how it works.
And then you've got supporting characters around that might be
subject matter expert experts in a given area that don't
necessarily need to be there full time, but we certainly
would like to have an hour, two hours, three hours of their
time. So that we can, you know,
understand their side of it. But that definitely comes into
place, right? Right.
And so, you know, moving on from the assessment, I think you made
a good point. We like, to, with our
assessment, bring it back to the client, have them review.
It verified that it's comprehensive and complete.
We didn't forget something. We didn't state facts
incorrectly. Usually that's not the case.
It's good to do a quality check and then we move on to making
recommendations and our recommendations are typically
based on best practices. So we know what the problems are
in the environment and we know what are the common industry
Solutions, but more so than just Technology Solutions, it's
there's some major themes that we generally look toward like
centralization automation. You know, consistent processes.
So that you know say you're working with a large
organization, they do things, different ways in different
departments, trying to drive toward once.
One common way of doing things is those are the typical
drivers. I'm not going to say that.
You know there's work for a hundred percent of organizations
but probably high 90s, you know, doing things from a central
perspective or at least having certain things done from a
central perspective. You know, it's not always the
case that you want to automate something, but you don't have a
framework for automating where it makes sense.
So that's really what we do from a recommendation standpoint.
And of course, you know, Jeff and I have a lot of experience
in the space. So we kind of a lot of these
things are second nature to us, but a lot of the, the benefits
that you get and kind of some of these best practices.
Like I talked about are also if Think about any kind of
Enterprise projects you're looking at and active directory
project or something like that, it would be the same kind of
theme centralization automation. So so those are our, the drivers
one of the ways you can, you know, if you're not working with
a consultant that you can start to get some ideas on how the
industry solves these problems would be to start to bring
vendors in, you to, you know, present them.
Here are the problems. What are your, you know, how
would you go? Solving these problems that's
going to give you some information now from the
adventure of your perspective. That's not how we operate
because we do it from a vendor agnostic, premium cream of mind.
We you know we want to say you know if we were in your shoes is
how we would do it. We based it on our experience.
So I think anybody could implement the framework but
nobody can Implement Jim McDonald's experience except for
Jim McConnell because I'm the only one who has my set of
experience in Jeff is the only one who has his and everybody
who's listening is the only person who has there's Rob but
you know. So that's kind of how we go
about the recommendations, kind of some of the major elements of
recommendations are going to be you know, people process and
Technology. What are the things that would
go about solving kind of the assessment doing kind of a gap
down analysis. You know, here are the gaps and
here the recommended Solutions. Another thing I would say is a
lot of things that are going to come out of.
Assessment have nothing to do with technology.
They just have to do with how you're running your IM program.
One of our recommendations is always gotta run.
I am as a program. I'm sorry.
Jeff, go ahead, no, no, I mean, you're right Honest, this is an
area. I think that it's, it's easy to
become overwhelmed, right? It's there's so many things that
might come out of just recommendations, but a lot of it
typically doesn't tend to be technology-based, right?
It's more on the process side. You know, one of the Questions
that we like to ask. You know, why do you do, what do
you do with that way? And sometimes no one really has
a good reason, why rights? No one, no one figured out or
wanted to kind of rock the boat. And, you know, maybe we play bad
cop. He was part of the part of the
part of the process, the same people.
Why you do it that way, what about this?
And kind of ask those questions. You know, you don't ask those,
you'll never get either a path for sometimes, but it's easy to
get overwhelmed, especially, you know, with some of our larger
engagements, where, you know, you may end up with like over
100 What'd you know, individual recommendations?
You can't solve everything all at once and you know, that
probably leads us into the next part.
Here, we talked about roadmap of, how do you prioritize?
You know what goes first? You know, is self-service
password, reset more important because your help desk is, you
know, drowning in those calls or is privileged access management,
you know, more important because you're not doing anything there,
right? How do you figure out you know
which which area comes first? Yeah, well there's there's
really no Silver Bullet for that.
I mean then you've got to look at what are the drivers in the
organization. Let's just say, you know, you
think the drivers automation we go into certain clients and we
just say my God you guys are drowning in Risk, right?
So another organizations are driven by risk and you know it
say Wow you guys could be doing the doing everything so much
better if you just had some automation, but usually it's a
balance of all those. That's risk.
It's automation, it's opportunity for, you know,
enabling new technologies and and certain things are going to
Bubble to the top. One thing that I think almost
never wants to be heard but is the cases that you're going to
introduce a lot of new technology footprint.
So say you're going to put an access management single sign-on
system in place. You're going to have some one
call it heavy lifting but there's some That needs to be
laid down. There's going to need to be some
basic work put into play to configure the system, you're
going to have to do, you know, Implement maybe one system as
kind of a proof of concept. Just to make sure that, you
know, nobody wants to do a big bang approach, even the smallest
Enterprises, don't want to do big bang.
So you've got to think about things in phases, but I'd say,
you know, more and more is moving to the cloud.
You can. The structure of a is is either
eliminated or shrunk down considerably but not everything
is moving to the cloud and this is a good blog topic for our
podcast, topic. For the future is to talk about,
you know, access management. Single sign-on is something that
is moving out to the cloud dramatically quicker than the
identity governance and administration space.
That's because companies the way they do identity Administration
and governance. Varies much more from
organization organization, the fields.
They have to manage and govern and provision it just it there's
so much more variance or a single.
Sign-on has really driven towards some of these Federation
protocol standards like saml 2.0 and open ID, open ID connect and
there's things have been able to move out to the cloud.
And there's now integration patterns that will be able to
take Cloud-based single sign-on and connected to applications,
that are even on-premise hosted. So, You know, I guess what the
point that I was making was, you know, don't forget kind of
infrastructure phases. Don't think that you can just
say our Phase 1 is going to be it just integrating applications
because you're going to have to get those confused early
configurations and maybe see a structure sign up as well.
That's kind of the traditional element, but they'll change to
write a mean. What if you're working on a road
map and especially if it's like any roadmap Beyond a year,
Right. There's gonna be changes that
come along the way. So you need to be able to be
flexible and adapt as things comes down down the penguin.
I think if somebody's out there listening and say, well, how do
I apply this to me because they can afford to go out and get
Consultants? How am I going to build my?
I am strategy and I think the hardest part is less coming up
with what the, you know, I think anybody may not anybody but most
of us can look at these problems.
Look at the vendor solutions that are out there.
Read what they say on their website, a watch their YouTube
videos. And say, I think this will solve
the problem. The hard part is being confident
that, yeah, it'll solve the problem is.
So that's why I think that, you know, why, or one of the reasons
why organizations want Jim and Geoff to come in to help is
that, you know what we've seen, and we can base it on our
experience to say, yeah, yes, we have to be very confident, you
don't. To come up with the strategy
that you're not 100% confident. If you don't have that
experience, if you don't have that experience, I think it
really you're going to have to go the extra mile and tap into
whatever, whatever resources you have available to you.
And one of the best ways. One of the ways, I learned a lot
about identity access management was tapping into my colleagues
at other companies, and my friends who were in the space
and message boards and things like that because, you know,
there are people out there who Ooh, love sharing information,
Jeff you and I are doing this podcast today because we love
sharing information, there's ways to get the information on
ways to get people's opinions. I'd say also within your
organization I am is you know, I am as a technical Beast unto
itself but a lot of the architecture design are going to
do you know pulling some of the Enterprise architecture team or
if you have other resources like that you can tap into to help
you. Sure that you're following good.
Architecture design principles, right?
What's that experience? I think that's, that's the
important thing. But, you know, this is one of
the reasons why I moved into Consulting was when you work for
a single company, you know, how they do it and, you know, the
tools that they used and when you're in Consulting you're
saying how way more companies do it?
You're getting a you know, much broader exposure to a larger
number of tools and you get to see much quicker what works what
doesn't work How particular issue might have been solved in
one organization and, you know, that's where that experience
Factor comes in. And you pull that, you know,
situation over and say, okay, this is very similar to what we
saw at company X. Now that we're company.
Why? Yeah, you know what we've seen
something similar to that? Let's talk about how this might
work, that certainly helps. And that goes back to reaching
out to your network, right? Trying to figure out everyone
struggles, with very similar problems, you know, for the most
part, it's Very rare that not very rare, but a lot of
companies struggle with very similar problems, which is see
that, that right? If you can talk with more folks,
in your networks etcetera and see how they solved it, there
may be components of their solution that might be able to
apply to fix your own. And, you know, once you talk to
enough folks and try to get enough data points, you start to
build that that confidence level that.
Yeah, okay. Here's the right way to approach
it. So, having that broad Network
and being able to talk with, Folks, you know, go to
conferences, you know, commiserate with the folks
there. Yeah, I think I'm going to just,
you know, be straight up and up front with some of the vendors,
right? So if you bring in a bender and
you guys specific problem, tell them what it is and see how they
would solve it right. That might help you understand
it sure they're gonna try and sell you their product but take
the information and as you're comparing different vendors see
how each one handles it. You may find that a you know the
vendor a is better at what you're looking for.
Specifically specifically the vendor be Even though vendor me
might be the big dog right in the industry.
So there's no, there's no Silver Bullet like you put it before.
Yeah. So after we go through a says,
recommend and roadmap now you have your strategy.
I think the final step now is communicate communicate
communicate tell everybody about your strategy presented to your
peers presented back to the folks that participated in
helping you You define what's working well, and what's not
working? Well, get by in, right?
And I would really start if you can kind of at more of the
Grassroots level, the people who participated and then work your
way up the channel. So that you're presenting to you
an executive team, letting them know that you have buy-in leg
them, know how you got to build the strategy who you talked
with, and that you've gone back to those teams and they're
buying in and it, my Experienced executive teams are going to
want to know. Does everybody agree with?
Does everybody agree that this is is the solution and then
they're going to want to know how much does it cost, everybody
agree. And how much does it cost,
right? Yeah.
But I mean and and again probably a another topic for
another time is really going about communicating, but that's
kind of the soft skills, right? It's about marketing, right?
It is that, when you're at, that point is all about.
Marketing. You got to be able to
communicate approval and you start going into projects.
That's where the technology is going to be technical skills are
going to be even more valuable because if you're a program
manager and you're running projects, you don't want to get,
you don't want to get technobabble to death or or
tricked. You want to be able to evaluate
that yourself and make sure that you get it.
That was always my thing, you know, there's Was
technology-related that was you know, outside of my expertise.
I see explain it to me until I understand it and eventually I
would not either understand it or they couldn't explain it to
me in a way that I understood and then I didn't want anything
to do with it. Yeah.
You can't articulate the value of whatever it is.
You're trying to do and it's obviously extends Beyond just I
am but you can actually fit articulate.
The value of what the i m Prime is going to bring what your
Trying to do, you're not gonna get the money to do anything.
I mean, right? I mean it's you have to be able
to tell the story of why we're doing this.
What's the benefit for it? How does it make our life
better, right? The trains that will get you the
money. Theoretically.
All right, you know, how much money is always up for today?
I mean budgets are always a, you know, hot button item, some
companies, you know may have, you know, set aside already
money for that or some haven't really in some I've been
thinking about it for a while and you know the longer you
wait. Typically the more you got to
spend up to get caught up, so to speak, but if you can't
articulate the value or what you're trying to do, nobody's
going to approve, any type of spending for that.
Yeah. So you want to be able to start
and start to master that communication strategy of what
is, what are we trying to do here?
Why are we doing it in? And why is it important, right?
Those sorts of things. I think that provides a pretty
good summary of our process. Could probably leave it there
for now. I agree.
I think you know our goal I think today was kind of Kick
this thing off, right? Just started.
And these are the types of conversations will have dive
into some more of these areas will, you know, this really the
plan part that we talked about today we'll talk about build
projects about how to run operations environment.
Does the kind of top Topics that people are interested in.
I think they'll still enjoy this podcast.
Yeah, I'm a really, you know, creates a wide range of topics,
anything it's really Identity or related.
It's probably in scope for us. That's current events topics
that we see come up during our own advisor engagements that
were working on and you have items that we might come across.
That people might find interesting.
And if those us, particularly, if there's a particular, you
know, topic or if you've got a question or just general
feedback, you can always email us.
That questions at identity at the center.com, awesome.
Jeff. I think it was great.
I think that was it for our first one so we're going to call
it there and thanks all for listening to take care.