Interoperability crossroads
				GM brings Sun, Microsoft to same table General Motors is treading where few enterprises dare. It has brought rivals Sun Microsystems and Microsoft to the same engineering table and tasked the giants with making their respective directory services, Java Directory Server and Active Directory, interoperable. At stake is the success of GM's three-year-long identity management program. GM has more than 400 AD servers and more than 100 of Sun's LDAP-based servers in its infrastructure, and Jarrod Jasper, chief architect of GM's project, wants to establish trust between the AD and Sun's Portal Access Management infrastructure. This will pave the way for GM to attain its ultimate goal of reduced sign-on. GM arguably has an edge in this relationship that most enterprises don't: It can flex considerable purchasing muscle. "No one has asked them to do what we're asking," Jasper says. "There are some intellectual property issues they're going to get into, but I think they understand that we're not the only company to have Sun and Microsoft in its environment. If it works for GM, it will probably work for the rest of the world. There's a value derived from this that they gain with other clients, and it adds to their overall feature set." Not so fast, says Burton Group analyst Dan Beckett. Sure, technology issues can be resolved, but Sun and Microsoft are among the technology giants in the identity management space, and competing business cultures will likely be too much to overcome. "What ends up happening is that one vendor or the other comes to the table with a solution set that meets more requirements than the other," Beckett says. "Then the integration is left up to the customer to figure out." Beckett says any big vendor would be hesitant to enter such a relationship. "You're not going to get them to solve that problem in such a way as to encourage interoperability," Beckett says. "It doesn't serve their goal, which is to sell their product. It's not on Microsoft's road map, for example. It provides solutions for Windows-based environments. Most of the vendors are the same way." --MICHAEL S. MIMOSO

An Information-Gathering Exercise
You'd be hard-pressed today to find a password on a sticky note at GM, much less 40 of them clinging to a keyboard. But if you were an engineer three years ago, part of the job description was wading through a sea of secret codes to access various CAD/ CAM applications and collaboration portals. Jasper and his team of five weren't interested in making the numbers work on a fancy ROI calculation. (Jasper would not disclose project costs.) Breaking even was good enough; improving the user experience was the real impetus for GM's identity management overhaul.

"Today, if you walk down the hallways and ask, you will learn that users feel things are getting better," Jasper says. "It's easier to access applications, and many of the simple frustrations have been removed--that is our measure of success."

Engineers are probably the best anecdotal evidence of improvements in the user experience. Not only were they once saddled with managing dozens of ID/password combinations, but they were also tasked with assigning IDs and access to applications. Engineering and design work played second fiddle to access management.

"We relieved them of those extraneous tasks by centralizing the identity function and reducing the need for multiple ID logins," Jasper says. "Now, they are able to focus on their primary tasks--collaborating with engineers and designers throughout GM and with outside suppliers to engineer and design great cars and trucks."

The initial steps of the project in 2004 consisted of gathering an inventory of systems and processes, and aligning them with the goal of reaching a common identifier and profile for each user that would be recognized across GM's infrastructure. Creating standardized, repeatable results was a mandate going forward.

By the end of 2005, each of GM's employees and internal users was assigned a common identifier. Users still had to authenticate multiple times, but could use persistent log-in IDs each time. By the end of 2006, business partners, including collaborators in joint ventures, suppliers and dealers, will also have unique identifiers.

Building user profiles was a critical yet painstaking process of immersion into each of GM's businesses. In order to ease the process, GM's human resources department was given business leadership of the project. HR understood the dependencies between a strong, common user profile and business objectives, and would be critical in collecting the data that makes up a user's profile without overstepping legal or regulatory boundaries regarding personally identifiable information.

Doing so not only made HR a major stakeholder in the project, but gave the teams a direct line to user data. Jasper wanted to build what he called DNA profiles--common denominators from each GM user that consistently identifies them in the network.

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