Forum21 Europe

After a rocky 12 months, the No. 1 challenge for today’s CIOs is to plan resilience. In particular, digital resilience - the ability of your organisation to leverage your digital capabilities to not only restore business operations in the face of disruption, but also capitalise on the changed conditions.

Key to this is a digital dream team comprising leaders in customer experience, operations, human resources, technology, finance and security. IT budgets may increasingly be away from the CIO’s direct control, but it will still be their responsibility to integrate new technology into a coherent plan.

Many customer and workforce experiences will require a trust shift. In retail, the rise of contactless kerbside pickup requires customers to put their trust in people they may never meet, like delivery drivers and stock pickers. The digitally resilient organisation drives trust by focusing on its key components: social responsibility and ethics, security, compliance and privacy. Getting this balance right is paramount – because trust takes a long time to build, but can be lost in an instant.

The right balance of usability, privacy and security is key to building seamless digital experiences for your customers – and identity is critical to achieving it. There are 4 pillars organisations must consider:

1. Frictionless experiences – delivering a consistent experience across all the apps and devices a customer may be using, in particular across the registration and login processes

2. Security for today – the identity service must be rigorously secure to prevent security breaches, mitigate fraud, and meet compliance and privacy requirements

3. Centralised management – to efficiently manage access decisions across the multiple applications and devices customers may be using, in particular by automating identity-centric workflows

4. Speed to market – customer experiences are ever evolving, requiring development teams to continually build and iterate. With a rich developer toolkit, developers can offload identity to Okta and focus on strategic goals

By integrating identity across your technology ecosystem, organisations can keep environments in sync and provide the best possible experiences for their customers.