Last Monday, Stephanie Balaouras and I recorded a podcast on a recent hot topic amongst Forrester clients — Enterprise Role Management (ERM). For the most part, people understand fundamental provisioning so I wanted to take this time to go through ERM in a little more detail.

Over the past few months, I have been asked many questions about taking ERM to the next level — about how to expand and automate identity management infrastructure. Before determining whether this is the right step for your company, however, it's important to understand the two most important benefits from doing so and also recognize the prerequisites.

Among others, two benefits of ERM are security and compliance. Achieving a more mature role management system will increase your organization’s security around information sharing, and it will enable understanding of the segregation of duties. Before achieving this level of security and compliance,  it’s important to simplify your identity repository and create a clear-cut set of records. This allows for a recertification phase when managers can take the time to revoke or grant access to existing accounts. Once you have created a clean, up-to-date role management database, your organization is ready to look forward to taking ERM to the next level.

After speaking with many clients on this topic, I have garnered a solid list of best practices that everyone should be aware of before attempting to strengthen any ERM system. These practices include data points around user population and recertification timelines, whether or not a hierarchical approach should be adopted to organize roles, and the value of tools such as Web single sign-on and security incident and event monitoring as they relate to role management.

To hear more, I encourage you to listen in!