Provisioning systems share many characteristics with metadirectories, including a tendency to provoke political battles over data and process ownership, systems integration and data scrubbing. And many organizations will implement a metadirectory as part of a provisioning deployment to create an integrated identity and security management system, which can double both the pain and the payoff. Not all provisioning systems have equal spans of control, either. Most enable database and application access, but vendors need to increase their support for provisioning devices, access to buildings and service subscriptions, as well as automate the ordering of equipment and other supplies for new employees. They also need to adopt uniform standards before provisioning systems can live up to their promise to cross corporate boundaries.
New products use XML to encode provisioning information, but all the formats are vendor-specific.
Business Layers and Access 360 are working separately to create standards that would let agents communicate with any compliant provisioning system, so we're a long way from interoperability. Still, the new generation of provisioning systems can relieve some significant pain. Jamie Lewis is CEO and research director of The Burton Group, a research firm specializing in network-computing technologies.