Identifying the Right CIAM Solution Through Comprehensive and Transparent Procurement

“TI can now move forward, confident that it will have a CIAM solution able to support its new ecommerce platform,” highlightsMarco. “Thanks to the proven experience and skill of Turnkey’s consultant in the sector, the time and effort required to identify the best outcome was reduced, andJTI’s trust in the expert and his management was rewarded with a successful procurement.”

— Dr. Marco Randi, Director ofTechnology

Challenge

In a stringent regulatory environment, effective customer identity management is an essential requirement for JTI, with its 16 on-line stores now operating in several countries. All the on-line web stores managed their customer information locally with each country having their own local identity and user management infrastructure. This made it difficult for JTI to adapt to changes in market and regulatory requirements and achieve a holistic view across its customer base. In addition, users all needed different credentials for each store and there was no consistent user experience across the channels. The administration overhead was complex and JTI had no single view of customers and their activities.

JTI needed a single, cloud-based platform for all Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM). The aim of the CIAM initiative would be to offer a seamless experience to its customers, improve overall security, and enable changes to be made easily across all its on-line stores, in response to business and regulatory requirements. A new CIAM solution would also enable JTI to increase customer acquisition and improve brand loyalty, while reducing the risks associated with possible data misuse. The solution would also need to integrate with both JTI’s central consumer data platform and its consent management application OneTrust, as well as being GDPR compliant.

Solution

Following a set of interviews, JTI selected a very qualified Turnkey consultant to lead the RFP for the sourcing of CIAM software for JTI’s online stores.

In late November 2020 the Turnkey specialist joined the JTI Digital team and took responsibility to lead the project, coordinating the collaboration with other JTI stakeholders and bidders.

The role engaged with a wide range of stakeholders across the organisation, from IT and security to business managers and lines of business leads, to develop detailed requirements for a Request for Proposal (RFP). It was important that all levels of the business were either involved in the process or informed of its progress.

Approximately 150 functional, nonfunctional, and business requirements were defined, including features such as customer self-registration, single signon and multi-factor authentication. The solution also needed to allow social integration via registration and login to enable progressive profiling of consumers over time.

To focus the RFP process on the best prospects, the consultant analysed independent industry sources such as Gartner as well as building on its own extensive experience of the market. As a result, JTI selected four vendors who were most likely to have the capability to meet its needs.

The project was managed with daily, virtual stand-up meetings, weekly reporting and regular communications with team members and stakeholders to review issues and risks. JTI management were kept informed of progress throughout the project with all documents being held in a shared repository, and any technical details were summarized to help better inform management making key decisions. The RFP responses were collated and presented in a way that helped JTI management to rank the responses according to their scoring mechanism. Vendors were scored against criteria such as technology and comprehensiveness, company fit, business requirements, non-functional requirements, and commercial terms. The vendors went through a shortlisting process, and the remaining suppliers were invited to provide presentations and demonstrations. To conclude the process the suppliers provided fully functional environments for a proof of concept (POC) validation of 15 selected use cases, that the Turnkey expert helped to develop with the different business areas. As a result of the thorough and fully transparent procurement process, JTI selected Okta to provide the CIAM capability. 

“The selected solution will provide JTI with a holistic view of its customers, allowing it to capitalise on the insights it will gain from user demographics, social registration and login data, behavioral data, and revenue activity,” explains Marco Randi, JTI. “Adherence to privacy and industry regulation will be easier and more agile, while the scalability will allow it to support its millions of customer identities globally.”

Benefits 

•  Professional, transparent procurement process:Turnkey’s expertise in the identity management discipline, its ability to ask the right questions, and include the right level of stakeholders throughout the business, gave JTI the confidence the process would be professionally conducted and would produce the best outcome for organization.
• Reduced procurement timescale: By using a Turnkey specialist to manage the selection process, JTI benefitted from the pre-RFP analysis and triage work undertaken to help it narrow down the RFP respondents to a shortlist of two providers, saving considerable time and effort.
• Best solution obtained for CIAM: The procurement exercise identified the most optimal solution for JTI, meeting all the needs identified in the comprehensive RFP. Inclusion of the proof-of-concept stage demonstrated the ability of vendors to meet a key set of JTI specific use cases, including enhanced automation.