Now the company's HR system is being used as a single authoritative record of employee status and information, which streamlines processes by allowing IT to work with HR to ensure accuracy of data.

With greater provisioning efficiency and automation, MasterCard is in a stronger position to ensure compliance -- an important consideration in the highly regulated financial services sector.

Customer satisfaction has increased dramatically. The identity management team is getting rave reviews from all levels of management -- new employees are able to be productive from day one. And that's a big plus.

This project worked because MasterCard's Compas understood the responsibilities of a security leader within the organization. He understood that his job was to get people to rethink how the company managed identities.

"For this project to succeed," he said, "it was just as much about the business process change as it was about the technology. This project required a tremendous focus on education and explaining the reasons why we were doing this. We had to demonstrate the benefits of the program to the organization as a whole."

That's a key point, particularly in an IT deployment of this scale and complexity -- essentially on par with any large-scale ERP implementation. To ensure that the project stayed on track and sustained the support of the company's management, Compas created a cross-functional governance team with representation from all key stakeholders. The team not only guided the project, it also kept all involved parties informed and updated as work progressed.

The result was that Compas achieved his objectives: