Enterprise Identity Management - What's in it for Organisations?

When introducing enterprise identity management systems (EIMS), organisations have to face various costs for the planning, the implementation, and the operation of such systems. Besides the technological issues, it is important that organisational aspects are incorporated into the development of an enterprise identity management (EIdM) solution as well. Indeed, without a proper assessment of the costs and the organisational settings (e.g. stakeholders, processes), companies will not see the benefit for introducing EIdM into their IT infrastructure and their business processes. This paper proposes initial ideas for a generic approach for assessing the value of investing in the introduction of EIMS (Type 1 IMS), which can be used for decision support purposes and the planning phase. Furthermore, the organisational aspects are discussed and possible solutions for integrating all relevant parties into the planning process are presented.