Transcript
I'm a solution consultant over here at SailPoint. But more importantly, today, I'm an enthusiastic member of our developer community. And I'm here today to talk to you about building experiences and outcomes, how we do it, why we do it, and along the way, we're going to build a couple together and use real world use cases and scenarios and show you that the barrier of entry to do this is a lot lower than it has been previously. Now, before we get into it, in my career, I've been really privileged in that I've gotten to experience the dynamic between business and IT from a couple of different lenses. I've been a customer. I've been a consultant, and I've been a vendor. And one thing that I've taken away from all of those experiences is that adoption is equivalent to experience. And if you analogize that in terms of products and technology, you could have the best product in the world, the best technology in the world, the best idea in the world. But if it's not consumable, if the way you have to interact with it and interface with it isn't natural and intuitive for the intended audience, it's never going to succeed. Now, don't take my word for it. Let's take a look at this by the numbers. These numbers come from Forbes and NN Group research studies. When we take a look at projects that have failed, we find that 80% of them have failed because the technology used, the outcome delivered, the experience of that did not match the audience's audience. It wasn't intuitive. It wasn't insightful. It wasn't direct for them to use. When we take a look at employees that have reported being unhappy in their ecosystem with their jobs, 96% of them report that one of their primary challenges is simply that the productivity tools that they use, the experiences aren't good or they don't have access to the right tools. Conversely, though, when we take a look at organizations that have taken the time and the effort to refactor something like a web application or a website, following that refactoring, following that redesign, they see a positive increase of about 135% in whatever key KPI they're tracking, whether that's clicks, flows, engagement. But you get the idea of what's going on there. Now, I know some of these numbers could be shocking, but I'm going to ask all of you to reflect for just a minute. We're all humans, and the majority of the decisions we make are experiential-based, from the food you eat to the car you drive to the phone you use, and that's probably the most relatable example that we can use today, the age-old discussion of Apple versus iPhone. Now, objectively, your phones do exactly the same thing, but it's the way you interact with them. It's some of those minute details and how many clicks it takes to get to a function or how it integrates with other technologies in your ecosystem. And those little differences, those little challenges, over time and because of the amount of time that you spend using those technologies, turn into big points of frustration and failure. Now, we spend a lot of time on our consumer devices, but we spend even more time with our business technologies. And I'm curious, I ask myself frequently why we don't have the same decisive focus on those experiences, why we've become so beholden to the experiences that vendors provide us. And I have a theory, and we're going to explore that just a little bit. But if I take a look back, historically, the burden for us as consumers of those technologies to refactor, to configure, to mold the experience in the way that I integrate with those technologies, the burden of entry has just been too high. It's been completely unattainable. Now, the good news is that's changed. And today, I'm going to ask you to come with me on a journey of what if, while we take a look at what a world could look like if that wasn't the case. So instead of having to use that white box software and force your business stakeholders and your users to use it as is with minor bits of configuration and maybe customization, what if it could be a contextual experience for them, storyboarded and engaged exactly the way that they need to see it for the job function that they're performing? What if you could deliver those experiences to them with clicks and maybe a little bit of code? But more importantly, at the speed of business, as new requirements come in, as they require things to be changed, you can address that in minutes, not months. And maybe most importantly, what if we could take the traditional feedback loop that we all kind of get stuck in when we're engaging with business stakeholders and business partners, and instead of taking months, years, long project and program cycles to deliver something that they find value in, what if we could make that significantly shorter? We can take you and transition you from being everything to just being the expert for your piece within an organization to make it work well. Well, the good news is that's here today. The barrier to entry has gotten significantly lower in the last couple of years. And I'm going to show you, we're going to build together an example of one of these use cases using a modern tool to do this. And we're going to use a real life company use case that I've encountered working with my customer base here at SailPoint. Now, before we go any further, I do want to say, hey, if you have any questions, please pop those into the chat. I'll do my best to address those afterwards. And we'll definitely get back to you. And for those of you that are watching this after the fact on YouTube or, you know, another streaming service, my kids would kill me if I didn't tell you to like and subscribe and leave a comment down below. All right. So with that, let's jump into our live exercise. All right. So hopefully you all can see my screen right now. What we're looking at is an example of a modern rapid application development platform. This one happens to be called UI Bakery. There's others like it, Drona HQ, AppSmith. I like this one. Again, going back to experiences, the way it functions, the ease of use, the number of components that are included in it, they speak to me. And I found it a great experience to use. Now, the first step in something like this is we create an application. And in this tool specifically, an application is really just a container. It's a way for us to say, hey, these things are going to belong to this set of people and we can assign permissions and controls. So hopefully you all can see this. What we did was we just created a sample experience. And what you'll, you know, notice directly is it gives us a, you know, blank canvas. And for those of you that have never used a tool like this before, it can be maybe a little daunting or a little busy. But we're going to demystify that right now. So starting at the top, we have a bunch of prebuilt components that we can use and leverage in this experience that we're building, right? We've got everything from data entry to data visibility to charts. Whatever you could need is really here. Now, these are easy to just click, drag and drop onto the canvas that we're working from. But as you'll notice, right, this populates with sample data that comes with the widget because it doesn't have anything to pull from yet. What we need to do is give it a data source to connect to first. Now, let me show you what that looks like on the back end. Defining a data source is incredibly simple with a tool like this. You can define a multitude of data sources. I've had this connected to Salesforce and ServiceNow environments in conjunction with my Identity Security Cloud environment. Right now, you can see that it is only connected to my Identity Security Cloud environment. But what's really compelling about that is that you can combine data points, experiences, interactions from multiple applications, data repositories and stacks within your organization into a single experience for your business stakeholders, your users, your consumers. So now that we've got the data source configured, we can go back to our page. And we're going to create an action. And this is essentially a way for us to get the data or the information that we want to feed into a UX component. I like to think of these components down here in this way, right? So you've got global actions, you've got page actions. What we're working with right now are page actions because I want them contained within this experience. And an action can be comprised of multiple steps. A step could be an API call, it could be a data transformation, it could be a code snippet, it could be anything that the tool supports. But they all work together in series to provide you with the outcome and the output that you need to deliver the type of component experience that you're looking for. So I'm just going to take a minute to name this. And I forgot to mention this earlier. The use case that we're building today is one focused around governance and compliance for certification campaigns. So a company that I was working with recently, their GRC team had a very specific need to take a look at all of their certification campaigns in a highly filterable, highly sortable way that they could also export. They had thousands of certification campaigns past, present, and planned. And the team themselves did not have the competency or the desire to use the Identity Security Cloud built-in search or APIs or another tool. So after just a couple of minutes of talking to them, we were able to create an experience storyboard that matched what they were looking for. And what we're building today is reflective of that. So the first action that I'm going to plug in is really the first step is to get our certification campaigns. So I'm going to go ahead and name that in an appropriate way so that I know what it is. And then the next step, you know, if you're a citizen developer or a line of business developer, you probably need to do a little bit of research to figure out how to get that information. And big shout out to Jordan, his entire team, everybody here at SailPoint that built and maintains this developer community. It is genuinely the best I've ever seen in my career and makes it really easy for those citizen developers to come in, search through content, get answers. And if you saw the announcement yesterday, you know, even interact conversationally with an AI to get more directive and specific information. But here I'm able to come in and really quickly understand which APIs I'm using, how it functions, what I need to do, and all of the parameters to include that into my actions over in UiBakery. So I'm going to go ahead and just name this in a way so that I know what it is. And then you'll see that the tool prompts me to pick the data source or the operation that I want to conduct. In this case, I want to send an API call directly to my identity security cloud tenant. So I'm going to go ahead and set that. What it does is it pre-populates a lot of this information based off of the way we configured the data source, leaving me really just to enter the API endpoint in this case. And then I can test the action to make sure it succeeds. Now, as you can see, the action did succeed. And I've got a whole bunch of data down here in array format. By itself, not super consumable for our governance folks, but we can fix that, right? We saw these components earlier. And there's one in particular that jumps out to me as valuable for this use case, and that's going to be the table. So I'm going to go ahead and insert a table object onto my blank canvas. And a couple of things you'll notice immediately. So since I only have one action defined so far, it was the last action I was working with, the tool was intelligent enough to say, hey, you know what? That's where I need to get the data. But this is 100% divinable. If you've got multiple actions or other data sources or other places to pull your data from, you would just update this reference right here. You'll also notice that it immediately generated a schema for the columns. And that's something that we can really easily come in and filter and change. And what I'm going to do, just for the purposes of this demonstration, is I'm going to just get rid of a couple of key columns. And I'm going to move some things around just so you can see what they look like. And now I've got something somewhat representative of what our business stakeholders were wanting to see. Now, there are a couple of things, again, that jump out to me as I'm working with them. Number one, right? My campaign information and the way it's returned from the API is in JSON format. And that's not necessarily something they're going to appreciate. Now, if I were a traditional UX app developer, I would probably need to take this output, transform it into something externally, and then port it back in. But using a tool like this, that's not the case. We can simply click on the field or the UX component. We can change the type of field it is, right? So from a JSON payload to a string. And then with just a little bit of built-in guidance, we can specify exactly which portion of that JSON string we want to use. And you'll see that it immediately gives you the resultant value. So you know that what you've placed is accurate and good. And you can continue to move on. All right. So now that we've modified that, I think we've got all of the information we need. This seems to line up with our business stakeholders. But we're missing a couple of things, right? One of their criteria was the ability to filter, sort, export information. So we're going to take a look here at some of the configuration options that are here. And we can see, hey, we can turn on, we can turn off a user's ability to resize columns. We're definitely going to turn that on. We've got some options to disable things, enable editing, enable sorting like we've got here. And we're going to set that to the name column just by default. And you'll see that we can turn off or turn on export actions, also specified deliminators. This is built-in functionality. We didn't have to code or change anything to add it. I'm going to add a summary row just to give me some high-level KPIs. You know, let's say I had total number of identities still in here, number of remaining certification actions. Great way for me to have that tabulated in an exportable format. And then the last thing we're going to do is, right past it, right here, we're going to show our inline table filters. So this gives our users the ability to contextually search, do keyword searches, and filter on the information that they want. Now, I'm going to go ahead and just add one more field for us to sort on, and that's going to be the completion status of the certification campaign. One other thing that I'll point out, and some of you, you know, that are watching may already be asking yourselves this question, right? But earlier, I defined how I'm going to get that data, and I manually executed it. But nowhere have I configured how the UX component is going to pull that information in or refresh it on an operational basis. This gives me the ability to specify a trigger type and then link it to an action. So for this UX component specifically, the table, I'm able to say, hey, on initialization or when I click something or change something or sort something, I want you to do this thing that I've already defined. And in this case, I wanted to go ahead and get a list of all those active certification campaigns, and I wanted to refresh that UX object. And that's exactly what we just specified here. So let's go ahead and finish our edit and take a look at what it looks like live. Again, very similar to what we saw in the edit phase, very responsive, and you can see it gives us what we're looking for. Now I know this is a simplified version of, you know, what a customer would actually deploy in real life, what you might actually deploy in real life, but it gives you an idea of how easy it is to do this. And again, having experiences and outcomes doesn't need to be high levels of codification, lots and lots of intrinsic tribalized knowledge. It's something that you can begin to do yourselves in a really easy, contextual, consumable manner. Now one other thing that I think is cool, and I would have loved to have had something like this when I was a customer and I was, you know, trying to also do product training while I was distributing these things. Oops. You can go ahead and insert, say, a link to a YouTube video and tell it to go ahead and play, loop, no volume, you know, and anything else you want. And this could be a training video for users, new users, instructional for them to be able to use. They can consume it. They can pause it. They can ignore it. Entirely up to them. All right. So that's one example of our ability to build this. And now I'm going to take just a couple of minutes to show you a more complicated application that I built in conjunction with one of my customers around one of their use cases. So I'm going to switch over to one of my other applications. I'm going to go back into the edit mode. And here you can see I'm building out a bunch of use cases here. This is kind of my scratch pad. This is where I incept and work with customers, you know, around their ideas. Now this one in particular that I'm about to show you is a human resources specific use case. So a company I was working with, they were preparing for a number of reductions in force and layoffs. And a question came up around how do we know who might be a riskier employee to terminate based on the access that they have? I might have folks that have access to privileged financial systems or privileged billing systems. How do we determine who they are so that we can better prepare for that event and not inject additional risk to our organization? And we went back and forth. They thought about maybe sending that information over to IT, having IT assess it, send it back. But the time gap in between that was a little too high. And they weren't necessarily keen on the idea of socializing a list of layoffs, as you can imagine, with the employee population that they were affecting. What we came up with was, again, easy contextual experience for them. We sat down and we conducted a similar storyboard experience where we talked to the HR stakeholders to understand what they needed to see, how they wanted to see it, and how they wanted to interact with the tool. And we built this experience right here. So at the end of the day, what they wanted to do was simply look up an employee. You know what? I'll actually put this into prod mode so you can see everything running. They wanted to simply select an employee and then be told if any kind of privileged access existed. They wanted some basic employee information contextually here, right? Which department are they in? What location? Who's their manager? They wanted the ability, because they had some more specific HR business partners that aligned with the technologies, to be able to get more information about those folks, selecting the specific data source, getting more information about the access that was in there, and then being able to filter it and figure out what that privileged access was so they could make a risk determination and involve the appropriate resources for that layoff event. All of this, the prototype, this was all built in less than an hour. Very easy to do. And I do not consider myself a professional developer by any stretch of the means. I am not on the same playing field as all of these legends you've seen earlier in the week. I very much so consider myself a business-level developer, and this is something that I'm able to do very easily, low barrier of entry, but affecting very real business outcomes. These are things that normally would have taken them, you know, months to engage a consultancy or maybe an internal application development team, and even longer to go through feedback loop cycles, to iterate, to improve, to adjust, and then to finally deploy in a meaningful way. This is something they were able to use in just a couple of weeks after going through architectural review, change review, and then deployment. So very high value, high speed to value. And I will just give you a peek behind the scenes real quick, just so you can see what this actually looks like from an actions perspective. So not incredibly complicated, right? So you can see most of these are just simple API calls. Now some of these I have done a little bit more than just a basic API call, right? So here I have an API call. Then what I'm doing is extracting information from that API call, and then I have a loop set up to do some fun processing work with it. One thing that I've appreciated about this, and again, we talked about it yesterday with the advent and the introduction of AI into our developer community, but I got to tell you, I mean, this has been an incredible contextual tool for me. And the inclusion of things like generative and responsive AI into tools like UI bakery have really, as low as the bar was to entry to create these before that, it's made it even lower. I'm able to ask it contextual questions, it's able to help me troubleshoot code, even write code, bringing us even closer to that threshold. So I hope this has been compelling for you all. I hope this was informative. I know this is something that is near and dear to my heart. I struggled with this when I was a customer, just providing my business stakeholders the experiences that they needed to be able to do something quickly and effectively in a frustration-free ecosystem. This is one more tool for your consideration, and I appreciate your time today. Thank you very much, and we look forward to engaging with you in the developer community.
