Three tips to Jumpstart your Distressed IGA Deployment

Rebecca Slisz

May 13, 2020

A focus of the Gartner Identity & Access Management Summit this week is identity governance and administration (IGA) as a foundational component to a successful identity and access management (IAM) initiative. When implemented properly, IGA solutions help organizations establish and secure access for their users, while improving administrative efficiency and ensuring compliance.  

But Gartner estimates that 50% of identity governance and administration (IGA) deployments are in “distress,” meaning they have failed to achieve functional, budgetary or timing commitments.  

Why is this the case?  

Generally speaking, Gartner states that, “despite advancements in identity governance and administration (IGA) solutions, many organizations still struggle with implementations due to a lack of focus and inability to link deployments to key business drivers such as operational efficiency, business enablement, compliance and security.” 

In healthcare specifically, there are three reasons why IGA projects run into trouble: 

  1. They are multi-year projects making it challenging to keep all the cross-functional teams engaged in technology implementation and change management.  

  1. Years-long projects are expensive to the organization in terms of dollars and opportunity costs, and don’t deliver the expected value to stakeholders. 

  1. Initial deployments are limited to “birthright” applications and often exclude other applications that are critical to user’s job function when they start.  

If any (or all) these challenges apply to your IGA implementation, here are some quick tips to get you back on track: 

  • Ask your IGA project team – including your vendors delivering and implementing the solution – about the implementation methodology. The Imprivata services team leverages our faster time-to-value methodology to get our customers live within 4-6 months. 

  • Ensure the initial implementation focuses on the most critical applications and you’ve worked with your vendor team to plan the next phases of your journey. In healthcare, this most often means your EMR and/or other core clinical applications, along with the Active Directory and email. Prioritizing these applications during the initial phase of your IGA project helps deliver a faster time to value.  

  • The partnership between the customer team and the vendor team is key to keeping the project on track. We see many projects get stuck because vendors require costly, time-consuming services engagements, even for incremental stages of the implementation. Your vendor should be a partner, helping your team manage certain parts of the implementation to avoid unnecessary investment or time delays. A good vendor will train your team to become more self-sufficient so they can continue to add applications and strengthen your IGA program.  

The bottom line is: IGA doesn’t have to be a barrier to successful IAM. With the right team, technology, and partners in place, an IGA implementation can reduce IT costs, strengthen data security and compliance, and empower care providers to deliver high quality care the moment they join the hospital. 

Read our whitepaper to learn how Imprivata Identity Governance, purpose-built for healthcare, and tied to a holistic IAM strategy, can strengthen – and simplify - your data security.