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Successful IAM Person

Personal Profile of a Successful IAM Person

Reference: http://www.linksbusinessgroup.com/blog/2007/10/18/breaking-in-to-iam/

To better understand what it takes to become an IAM Person, or a more successful IAM person, it is first useful to have some background and visualize a profile. General personal traits include (but are not limited to):

* Strong, natural communication skills
* Endless patience
* Stamina and endurance
* Perseverance
* Strong understanding of business, business models, industry verticals
* Flexibility
* Reliability
* (notice how we are nowhere near talking about technical skills yet...?)
* "Can do / Will do" attitude
* Ability to collect, collate, synthesize, and disseminate client requirements
* Confidence in speaking publicly
* Great demonstration skills
* Strong ability to present highly technical concepts in real-world business terms, to real-world business users
* Consultative salesmanship skills
* Timeliness
* Ability to think in "big picture" terms, while having the ability to manage countless small details
* Highly customer focused
* Skilled in effective troubleshooting and resolution techniques
* Understanding of what makes a good report, and a good presentation

Technical Profile of a Successful IAM Person

* Full grasp of Systems Administration issues
* Full grasp of Network Administration issues
* Deep understanding (especially in regard to security components) of at least two major operating systems (hint: at least one of them should be a modern variant of UNIX)
* Complete working comfort with at least two major enterprise RDBMS platforms (hint: at least one of them should be Oracle)
* Full grasp of command-line tools for each focus platform
* Ability to script complex tasks in at least one major scripting language (hint: at least one of these languages should be UNIX shell)
* Ability to create basic software programs, or make basic modifications (hint: Java at a minimum, Java + .NET for a bonus round, and ideally a smattering of C thrown in.)
* Deep understanding of everything web/HTTP/TCP/IP oriented
* Deep understanding of data security issues, especially in the areas of application and database security
* Deep understanding of client/server applications (not just the web stuff....)
* Deep understanding of databases and data structures
* There are other areas of concentration, but people possessing a good mix of the above can go quite far in the IAM Business.

Where do IAM People often come from?

* Systems Administration/Monitoring/Management
* Software development
* Business majors and business consultants
* Project Managers
* Software/Enterprise Architects
* Data Security
* Legal/Compliance
* Technical Management/Administration
* Helpdesk/Support
* Directory Services
* System/Application Integrators