Holcim increases operational efficiency and reduces risk

A Conversation with SailPoint and Holcim

Hello, and welcome to our viewers. We’re here to talk Identity Works. I’m Nicole Thomas and today we’re going to hear from a SailPoint customer, Daniel Ballesteros. He’s the User Lifecycle Expert at Holcim. Holcim is a global leader in building materials and solutions. Daniel, thank you so much for joining me today.

No problem. Thanks to you for inviting me

First question for you. Can you tell me a little bit about your background and what you do?

Yeah, of course. I have been working in many different companies for seven years for now, doing many identity management projects. I have been only focused on identity management honestly and I have too many background working with IdentityIQ. I have seven years of background, I have been working for seven years with this tool and nowadays I am working here in Holcim as a User Lifecycle Management Expert and I am part of the level three support team for this tool. We are developing all the requests that we are receiving from users, we are defining how the tool should be developed or should be evolution and these kind of things.

Could you tell me a little bit about your Identity journey so far?

Yeah, if I’m honest our journey was kind of tough but I would say that at the same time, it has been gratifying for all of us. We had to learn lots of new concepts that we were not used to, overcoming many obstacles, adapt our business processes to a whole new approach and even learned many things. In this journey, we also realized that identity management is not only about business processes. We learned that listening to those persons that are representing the identities that we are managing, really helps or rates the success. So we are continuously making IdentityIQ better by providing many important features that makes it more accessible for end user. And some of these features are for example, publishing the tool on the internet and ensuring that everything and every single process are protected against attacks or against malware and these kind of things, also providing improved workflows to requests for example, SAP access, so users don’t need to invest too much time or find the role they want to request or to retake the segregation of duties conflicts and these kind of things. Also customizing the GRC integration that you provided us. So we are making the tool proactive instead of reactive. So we are saving too much time on access reviews or in all the events and these things because we are generating reports. We are integrated also with ClickView and there’s no things just to provide information and to provide controls to our accesses. We have also improved the controls to install our minimum controller standards. So our audits are more successful and we can prove in a more high level, the things that we are requesting for all the applications, you know, just to meet these controls. And we have also implemented an agile methodology just to deliver features in the tool that makes the life easier to our users. And then if you want me to talk about the numbers or the amount of identities that we are managing, actually, we’ve got 25 key identities managed by the tool, from 35 countries which are so much countries and we are also connected to around 60 applications. So I think that our scope is too high and It’s also becoming higher because we are planning to integrate more countries and more applications in the short term.

How has your vision for your identity program changed given the state of the world we live in today?

So the current situation didn’t change our program at all. We always thought that the identity management is one of the most important parts of the companies, just because this concept that seems to be tiny and to include just one thing, includes many important pieces on a company. Pieces like the IT efficiency, the security, the instance, the access management and controls, all of these and so on. So we think that our reach would be important enough before the crisis and our program didn’t change at all. We are already committed enough to develop our identity management tool and take you further.

What has been the biggest win from your team’s identity efforts?

It is simple I think. I think that the best win has been the game to gain the trust of our users. Thanks to all the efforts that we have made in these past years, users are becoming more confident and also more collaborative with us. They give us many clues about the lacks or issues that the tool has, also thanks to this confidence, we have been requested to integrate new concepts in the tool due to the good feedback that CEOs are constantly receiving from other countries. So for example, we are planning to integrate France, which is one of our most important countries in the whole thing shortly and that was because the good feedbacks that they received. So I think that for us, this is the best recognition that we could have and also the motivation to get people asking to be integrated in our tool and be managed by us.

What’s on the horizon for identity?

We have very great plans for the identity management in our company and we are as I told you, we have an agile methodology to develop. So we are constantly enhancing the tool, taking into account the user suggestions, you know. We do a forum monthly where all the people are sharing just opinions about how the tool could be improved or the feedbacks that they get from some issues or some experiences that they have. So we are learning so many things from them and thanks to that we are introducing more controls, more automatic process, more features just like enable users to approve or deny a request directly from the email. We want to avoid them to get into IdentityIQ, we just want them to send an email or just to click a button in the email just to approve or deny a request. We are applying also to manage the SAP roles in IdentityIQ just to centralize the place where all these things are managed, you know, for us will be a huge step forward because it will provide us efficiency in terms of the way we do things and the way that the information is treated and these kind of things. So it will be a milestone in our journey for sure. Then as I told, two of our most countries, as it is France and UK, will be integrated shortly in the tool. The most important thing, more critical business applications that are now disconnected from IdentityIQ will be connected also shortly. So it will provide us more control over our environment and the way that the access are managed. So these are only a few things, a sneak peek of what we will be doing.

If Identity was a celebrity TV or movie character, who would it be and why?

Okay. So I have been thinking about this question so hard and it was also hard for me to find someone to be related to this question and finally I found Beyonce as the person who I can relate with. So my reasons are because when she first started, no one trusted on her, she was rejected in many music contests when she was a child or even a teenager before her father created this new child and put them on the hotline. So she always says that she learned many things of those flops. They made her mature and realize what life is. So nowadays she is a reference in the music industry, thanks to the hard work that she has always made. Everything that Beyonce does right now is considered as a reference and is followed by many singers all around the world. So I think that our experience in identity is kind of the same. We started with no trust, no one trusted on us. Everyone was pointing our self because the way we were doing identity management and along these years, we learned too many things as Beyonce did when she was a child and we matured enough and nowadays we gained the confidence of our users on our employees. So I think that for us that could be a good reference and a good comparison.

Thank you so much. It’s been a pleasure talking to you Daniel, learning more about Holcim’s identity journey. We’re excited to see what you and the team accomplish next. Thank you so much.

Thank you.

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