Enrich e-services and smoothen the user-experience together with your partners

Today most or all companies, or organizations, are so called extended enterprises to some extent, at least. This means that they on one hand, for companies obviously, have customers or clients that they interact with; and on the other hand that they have partners that they co-operate closely with. So, their operations involve and embrace these important stakeholders that they work together with, on a daily basis within their corporate processes.

This co-operation requires supporting tools and services from IT, which today typically very strongly involves communication and the internet. Some extended enterprises have gone so far, that to define and deploy intertwined or at lest inter-connected business processes. We see companies working together to provide the best business and service concepts together with partner companies, in a way that they could not manage on their own. This is of course all very positive.

This trend is a start to something even bigger and it is a sign of what is even more strongly yet to come, that is that partners create new business concepts and co-operation models and want to get them out in practice and "production" rapidly.

Many of the e-services created in this way, require and rely on knowing who the end-user or customer is, and being able to share that identity information in a secure manner. What is now happening and ever so more in the near future, is that the pace at which these kind of new joint business concepts are created and deployed in production is increasing rapidly.

Therefore IT and identity and access management should not be in the way as the new concepts are very key to success in the future. Instead IT should be an enabling and supportive tool and a platform for the new blooming business concepts. IT should be part of the joint efforts to create the best user-experiences. The typical user of today is impatient and demanding. There is no longer place for clicking one-self here and there and entering tedious information left and right to reach some service. Services and the information must appear instantly, securely and be to-the-point.

In all this Identity and Access management (IAM) plays a very essential role. IAM can successfully be used as an integration mechanism to help link scattered services, creating the successful user-experiences and increasing the in-flow of new customers and new users securely and well-managed. It is an exciting opportunity for business. Grab it!

-- Charles Sederholm, Chairman, Founder, Ubisecure