It was a cold evening back in
fall 2010 when a succinct but impressive cake cutting ceremony was held at
Oslo’s massive indoor stadium, Telenor Arena. The ceremony progressed with some
speeches and presentations, leading to a delicious cake and refreshments. The gathering also comprised of brilliant IT
Security and Identity & Access Management professionals, who were accompanied
by personnel from other IT disciplines. Most of the audience showed great enthusiasm
and pitched very interesting questions which were responded with great passion
and confidence by those energetic professionals.
It was the launching ceremony of
an application that received OracleFusion Middleware Innovation award at
Oracle Open World, in the same year. The application was built on the concept of
‘Identity as a service’ for group companies and proved
to be a great addition in application portfolio of our Shared Services
organization.
Customized GUI over top of Oracle Identity Manager
The application was built as a
customized layer upon Oracle Identity Manager 10g and offered user friendly
Certification audits and Access Request Management, powered by a multi-tenant architecture.
The features were a bit early of their time in IdM world and were key reasons
to build customized layer over top of standard solution of Oracle. Though it was not the
first time that we built customized application using APIs of standard identity
manager, we had already done that in the form of “user creation management GUI”
on top of Oracle Identity Manager 9i.
Shortcomings of Customized solution
Though customization results a
product according to customer’s desire and fulfills requirements more
precisely, but we shall have to believe that technology has somewhat matured
recently and companies are offering off-the shelf solutions, better than
the traditional tailored products.
Following are the major shortcomings
of Customized solution that were faced.
- A tailored solution is always expensive than using an off-the shelf product. The logic is simple – customized product are made for a single customer and consequently all development expenses are borne by one entity.
- Upgrade to newer version is always a big challenge when using a customized solution, but it becomes even bigger when customization is heavily dependent upon the application interfaces (APIs and WebServices). I still remember the mayhem while upgrading from OIM 10g to OIM 11gR1 :)
- Maintenance and development of a customized solution (application) requires considerable time and resources as compared to the standard solution. A dedicated team of programming geeks is a must, for successfully running a tailored solution. Another relevant challenge is training and coaching of newly hired resources. Every time a new resource is hired to fulfill a vacant position, a hands-on training will be required for him to understand the architecture and approach used for customization.
- The product support community does not offer any support for a customized product, so if you get a bug or challenge in your customized solution, you will be the only one to resolve that.
- It is admitted by many of the solution providers, that customization has resulted in slow performance of their application instances. Allowed customization approaches use standard APIs or related interfaces to interact with core application, which have always been considered performance degraders due to the formalities of applications towards external interfaces. This challenge is not only true for Identity Management but similar feedback has been reported by experts of other products i.e. Oracle E-business suite and Oracle SOA suite.
Oracle’s Beta testing program
The Beta
Testing Program is a joint venture featuring Oracle and its customers. This
initiative provides a structured approach to include users of Oracle
applications from selective organizations in the Beta Testing Programs. The
overall goal is to allow selected users to perform in depth testing and
analysis of Oracle's new products and releases in order to help Oracle deliver
better products to market. As a beta testing participant, testers perform
in-depth testing of the next generation of Oracle products. This also
helps to build personal knowledge base, become an industry recognized
technology leader, and help influence Oracle's future product direction.
Our
organization, as a Shared Services Solution Provider of Identity and Access
Management, was also involved in the beta testing for patch set 2 (PS2) of
Identity and Access Management suite 11gR2. The focus area from our side was
limited to Identity Governance – more specifically, features of Multi-Tenancy
and Access Request Management. (See my article on PS2 features for more detail).
Decommissioning of Tailored layer and
rollout of Off-The-Shelf Solution
It's a common misunderstanding
that boundaries limit creativity. It may sounds unreasonable, but
boundaries can actually boost creativity. Instead, we need to impose boundaries
by tightening our processes and one way to achieve this effectively is with
Off-The-Shelf solutions.
As involvement
in beta testing program resulted in the confidence on much awaited
functionalities, last week we have decided to decommission the customized
layer by moving functionalities in OIM 11gR2 PS2. The work has actually
been started and intention is to complete before summer vocation of 2014. We're
crossing our fingers and hoping that the rollout of Off-The-Shelf solution stays
fine.
