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Most organizations recognize innovation as a way to introduce new features and functions that engage customers, make them happier and increase loyalty. While organizations understand the power of innovation, in practice they may lack the security mechanisms to participate, writes Ashley Diffey, director of APAC and Japan at Ping Identity.
Today’s pace of digital acceleration initiatives means organizations must innovate faster. It’s about getting innovative features out quickly, as existing customers and the broader market demand a cadence of new features.
However, innovating at a rapid pace can conflict with internal risk and thresholds. Especially in highly regulated industries such as financial services, maintaining a high level of uptime and availability of a customer-facing transactional service is a top priority for operations teams.
While there may be opportunities to improve the Service by adding new technological features or functionality, this must be carefully weighed against the risk of inadvertent damage and downtime. Teams may take the position that if the service isn’t broken, there’s no need to try to “fix” it.
That being said, customers today have certain expectations about what it means to be able to conduct digital transactions. At some point, these expectations need to be met.
Ideally, it must happen that this internal innovation bottleneck is resolved. The way to do this is to have frameworks and systems that instill confidence that innovations can be made and introduced into an existing process or workflow safely and securely, with minimal or no disruption to the production instance.
One way to do this is to put identity at the center of innovation efforts. This provides detailed insight into how individual users or cohorts of users, such as users in specific geographic areas or IP address ranges, are experiencing the upgrade. It quickly becomes clear whether the innovation brings added value or limits the user experience.
Additionally, a low/no-code orchestration platform can be a useful way to seed innovation among user subgroups. Through these platforms, teams map their existing workflows and then create an extended version that they can test live on a small subset of users.
This setup allows experimentation to progress while giving teams confidence that they don’t have to introduce innovative technology in a “big bang” fashion. That is, a situation that could backfire if the technology disrupts the workflow or is not adopted by users, requiring a rollback.
Here, if the innovation fails or creates a suboptimal environment, a cohort of users acting as testers can simply be moved back to the original workflow to complete their transaction. This creates a safe space for the innovation that teams ultimately want.
De-risking innovation to achieve positive results
The identity has evolved considerably over time. While it was once just an account and password, it’s now a common frame of reference used by many parts of the organization, from security and risk management to customer acquisition and marketing.
Identity is now a “single view of the customer”. It relies on showing how customers interact with digital properties. People in an organization use identity to understand where a customer went, how long they stayed, and what they liked and didn’t like about their experience.
Identity is at the heart of every part of the customer journey. From the user’s perspective, it’s important that the identity gives them the exceptional digital experiences they want, with as little friction as possible—for example, a quick multi-factor authentication challenge—to secure them and their organization.
When innovations are launched, the key question is: did the users who were given the innovation experience benefit? Did it affect users good or bad? An identity center can be a great source of real-time data on how a new innovative feature or function has affected individual customer behavior. This is essential if follow-up is to be data-driven; that is, they are informed by actual user experience, instead of internal fears of what might go wrong.
Introducing innovation into an existing customer journey or transaction process can be further reduced with AB testing. An orchestration platform can be used to introduce innovative features on a limited basis and perform “what-if” testing to determine whether or not the innovation results in a significant improvement in performance or customer experience.
A good orchestration solution is vendor independent, meaning it can work with any technology, anywhere, anytime. This enables a wide range of innovative experiments.
It should also provide other telemetry data very quickly: if, for example, part of a transaction takes forever to complete, questions can be immediately answered about the root cause: whether the bottleneck is a device firewall, a network connection, or a slow server. , an orchestration solution can be used to visualize a complex transaction or customer flow and quickly identify any sub-optimal performing components.
The result of identity orchestration is a newfound ability to innovate repeatedly and reliably, accelerating new digital initiatives that are not only secure, but achieve higher customer satisfaction by being able to offer new and improved experiences.
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