Latest / Identity at the Center / #284 - Identiverse 2024: George Roberts from McDonald’s

Transcript

#284 - Identiverse 2024: George Roberts from McDonald’s · Identity at the Center

0:00
It seemed that a lot actually it's like this digit, this idea
0:03
of digital transformation driving a lot of standardized
0:08
identity approaches down that seems like that kind of also.
0:11
Yeah, does this it's when you get to the point what George me
0:14
just described me where realist. Oh, oh, that's actually they
0:21
call that identity and access mention.
0:22
OK. Yeah, we need that.
0:24
Well, The funny thing is, I mean even at that point we rolled out
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sort of a new identity platform, but all of the markets still
0:33
manage their all identity platforms for their local
0:37
applications for their local PCs, etcetera.
0:40
So we had for this dichotomy of the the global platform which
0:46
only got you into this extranet and subsequently any application
0:51
that sort of tied in. This is identity at the center
1:01
if it has anything to do with IAM.
1:04
This is the go to podcast now your hosts Jim McDonald and Jeff
1:10
Stedman. Welcome to the Identity at the
1:18
Center podcast. I'm Jeff at.
1:20
That's Jim. Hey, Jeff.
1:21
Hey, Jeff, how are you? Oh.
1:22
And that's a bad or so. People Las Vegas for you meet
1:25
you Las. Vegas baby.
1:28
What happens, and this way I realized what, when you say what
1:30
happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, you're talking about things that
1:33
you do. You see people randomly in
1:36
public doing stupid stuff that doesn't have to.
1:39
Stay in Vegas. You can go and tell your
1:40
friends. Yeah.
1:41
You know, they don't know you probably, and you don't know
1:44
them properly. And they become a story that you
1:47
tell everyone else. Remember that time I saw this
1:50
crazy magician? You were telling me stories
1:52
about a magician. Oh, unbelievable.
1:55
Magician. The magician.
1:56
So we saw Shindlin. Fantastic.
1:59
You know, mind, you know, just by nature it is here.
2:03
Yeah. Well, my nature is to try to
2:05
figure out what's going on. How many do you know that that
2:09
person's birthday was XY and Z here?
2:12
How did they? How do you know, like, where
2:14
they were from? Like he pulled one lady out of
2:17
the audience and said, oh, your. Your accent sounds like you're
2:22
from Michigan. And then he went on to name the
2:25
town in Michigan that she was from, which I'd never heard.
2:29
Wasn't like Dearborn or Detroit or something like that.
2:33
So I thought that was pretty cool.
2:35
And then we had that magician show up at the restaurant that
2:39
we were at and kind of the same deal where, you know, he did all
2:42
these tricks and it was like, wow, that's really, really
2:47
tricky. Duck sliding.
2:49
And the misdirection, of course. Yeah, it gave you the.
2:51
You know, there's a lot of this like look at my hand and like
2:54
this hand's doing something else, so.
2:56
But stracking somewhere, it's Vegas in spite of like an
3:00
explosion and that there's something happening.
3:02
All I can tell you is like this stuff doesn't happen in the best
3:05
of Church of our house. It's not.
3:07
I haven't run into it yet, so. There aren't just random, no
3:10
random. Musicals.
3:11
You just show up at your table and, you know, take your money
3:15
and set it on fire. And she's like, Oh my God, I
3:18
guess I'm not getting that $20 bill back.
3:20
That's the only trick, right? If we're deaf, we're going.
3:22
Where's my money done? Yeah, right.
3:25
Well, why don't we go ahead and get into this week?
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So we're at a dinners, we're live.
3:29
We're doing video for the first time in at Universe, it comes
3:32
out. See.
3:33
Knock on wood. We've got our guest, George
3:36
Roberts. He's the global access identity
3:38
director at McDonald's. Welcome to the show.
3:41
Thank you for having me. Thanks so much for taking the
3:43
time with us. Definitely want to give a shout
3:44
out to RSM. Thanks for sponsoring us to get
3:47
us out here and have conversations like this.
3:49
Thanks to Cyrus Alliance. We're giving a place to sit down
3:52
record this a place to plug in bring all that good stuff, but
3:56
why don't we saw it just go ahead and get into it.
3:58
So I've done ever 2024 George this first time we've been on
4:01
the show. We're all the kind of about the
4:03
history and the origin stories of what the heroes in the states
4:07
that call it. How did you get into the
4:09
wonderful world about Danny next?
4:12
So I, I actually have a background mainly in software
4:15
engineering and number of years ago I, I built what later became
4:22
a component of McDonald's identity and access platform as,
4:27
as a consultant. And I was in a different role
4:32
and then got an opportunity to sort of combat and take over
4:37
the, the project that I had actually built many years ago.
4:41
And it just kind of snowballed from there.
4:43
So I've actually been doing identity and access focused work
4:47
for the last six years, but I've been kind of tangent to that
4:50
from that year before that, so. So I noticed you kind of ping
4:54
pong back and forth when wearing.
4:55
I'd like to say where I was here LinkedIn looking for ideas from
4:58
this. You're at McDonald's consulting
5:01
other things McDonald's again consulting adopt.
5:03
Why is it they keep plenty of that other than the French?
5:06
Fries. Yeah.
5:07
You know, a lot of us, we like to say we've got ketchup in our
5:10
blood. I.
5:11
Don't know if that's helping. Probably not, but yeah, you
5:16
know, I mean, it's, it's a great, a great place to work.
5:19
The the culture is phenomenal. You know, like any big company,
5:25
there's always times when you, you know, there are outsourcing
5:29
that happened and I just happened to be in the the wrong
5:34
area at the wrong time, I guess you would say.
5:36
And a couple of the, the ping pongs that you you saw was when
5:41
I had transitioned over to an external provider for
5:45
McDonald's. So actually over the last like
5:48
25 years, I think guys worked for McDonald's as either a
5:52
consultant or an employee for 21 of the last 25 years.
5:56
Been there long time. What's the biggest change you've
5:59
seen in your time? Wow.
6:04
You know, I think probably in general for McDonald's is that
6:11
recently we've kind of come to accept the fact that we're a, a
6:17
technology company. You know, a lot for a long time
6:22
McDonald's was technology was a, a, a cost Center for, for
6:27
McDonald's. But you know, in recent years
6:32
with the advent of our mobile app and our kiosks and our
6:35
restaurants, I think our our leadership has really recognize
6:40
how much of A of an advantage that really brings to us.
6:44
And we've we've kind of shifted our thinking away from
6:48
technology being a con center to being a business and you're.
6:53
Really at that these days meaningless.
6:56
What restaurant do you go to that doesn't have a now I think
7:00
you guys do a good job. The fact and they don't usually
7:03
ask our guests for favors, but we did hear that there is a,
7:07
you're right, Corey, in Chicago, IL, right, yes.
7:10
And so you have a, we hear there's like a test kitchen or
7:13
test restaurant with all the international offerings.
7:17
You can go to this test kitchen. Are you sure you're reporting
7:22
blogging? Me, yeah.
7:22
So our, our global restaurant, which is it is actually a public
7:27
restaurant. It's on our on the 1st floor in
7:30
our in our building, but it is open to the public.
7:33
So if you're in Chicago, come, come check it out.
7:36
We don't, it doesn't have all of our global offerings, but what
7:40
they do is around every three months or so, they'll rotate
7:45
some international offerings. And so they'll usually have one
7:49
or two of like the, the international sandwiches.
7:52
They'll have some kind of like an international side, like
7:55
maybe you know, different types of potato, like potato wedges or
8:02
shake fries or other things like that where if you haven't had
8:06
the shake fries, it's like fries in a bag with like a seasoning
8:09
and then you you dump in there and shake it up and it.
8:12
Gets all. That's not at all.
8:14
Yeah, no, I it is not a shake and a fries.
8:16
Although I'm told that dipping your fries in shake is also very
8:19
good. It's except for.
8:21
Yeah, I like that. So tell us about your typical
8:24
day. I mean what you know
8:28
specifically within identity access venture, what are the
8:30
areas that you cover and then is it like you mouse your team that
8:33
does those things or are you more hand?
8:35
Yeah. So I lead our identity and
8:40
access engineering team. And so basically my team is
8:43
responsible for building, maintaining, enhancing our
8:48
identity and access platform for McDonald's enterprise users
8:53
worldwide. So the way McDonald's operates
8:58
from a sort of a day-to-day identity management perspective
9:01
is a lot of that is done by our IT teams within our markets.
9:08
We have 115 different markets globally.
9:10
So sort of day-to-day management password password changes
9:15
etcetera is done by the local markets.
9:18
My team is more focused on actually building and running
9:22
the, the identity life cycle, IGA, you know, password resets,
9:28
MFA, all, all of the, the technical work.
9:31
And so, you know, we're always looking at, you know, what are
9:35
the, the newest and latest and greatest technologies available.
9:40
How can we apply that to to our platform to enhance both the
9:46
security of McDonald's as well as the user experience, our
9:49
users? So within that that store
9:51
network, I mean how many of the the our daily life signals are
9:54
you responsible for? Is it everybody from the top
9:57
manager all the way down to the line cooks?
9:59
Yes. So look at we have two and a
10:01
half million users worldwide and and that's at everyone from our
10:07
CEO down to our three people that are.
10:10
After crazy amount 2.5 million. Yeah.
10:13
I bet you when you go out and buy some kind of software like
10:19
an identity management technology, scalability is a
10:23
real issue. Absolutely.
10:24
Ken, yes, I like what I see. But can you handle like 5
10:28
million users? Yeah.
10:29
And, and honestly, the, some of the biggest challenges that we
10:33
see are are around the, the sort of the wide breadth of types of
10:39
users that we have, right? Because, you know, our corporate
10:42
users, our, our staff people, you know, people on my team,
10:45
etcetera. They're, they're using
10:48
McDonald's laptops that we have McDonald's issued phones.
10:51
So we can, we can kind of control what that experience
10:54
looks like. We can enable things like
10:56
Windows Hello for business, etcetera.
10:58
But when you're talking about our crew people in our
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restaurants, most of them don't even work for McDonald's
11:05
directly as employee. They work for franchise who owns
11:09
the restaurant. So we don't have as much control
11:13
over what they're experience is like from a device perspective,
11:17
right, because they're they're not getting smartphones issued
11:22
to them from the company. We can't you know require them
11:26
to use a personal device to be able to do things like MMA and
11:31
things of that. So that's where a lot of our
11:33
challenges are is how do we how do we build or buy platform that
11:38
is going to support such a wide variance of different user types
11:43
and user experience it? Does your team like a 24 by 7
11:48
operation? Do you have people like globally
11:50
dispersed or do you are you able to have a well turn in one place
11:54
and just have people around the clock?
11:56
And so we're on right now, we are sort of hair McDonald's
12:01
employees, which are really focused more on sort of product
12:06
and service management and technical direction.
12:10
And then we also rely heavily on partners who do provide that 24
12:16
by 7 coverage to ensure the platform is up and running,
12:20
handle support tickets, things like that.
12:23
So we have some folks obviously on my team in Chicago and other
12:28
parts of the US working remotely, but we also have a
12:32
team in Croatia, team in India as well.
12:36
Craig should that's the first time to hear that come up as
12:38
like IT hub. Yeah, it's one of one of our our
12:42
key vendors is is located is. There a particular technology or
12:49
area that really interests you right now?
12:55
Well, I mean. So later this week, I'm, I'm
12:59
talking, you know, participating in one of the keynotes on, on
13:02
authorization. It's, that's a big area of our
13:06
focus for, for us is, you know, we've, we've kind of solved the
13:11
authentication issue. You know, we're, we, we rely
13:16
heavily on SAML and at Open ID Connect and it's pretty easy for
13:23
us to, to onboard an application from an SSO perspective, it's
13:28
kind of like doing 30 minutes worth of work.
13:30
We like all the variables in and, and away you go, but the
13:34
authorization side is much more, much more complicated.
13:39
We, you know, we, we look at it like to think it's somewhere in
13:45
the 120 hours range on the average for us to integrate from
13:51
an authorization standpoint an application.
13:53
And it's very custom, you know, a lot of connecting directly to
14:00
databases or God forbid, doing flat file data, you know, data
14:07
transfers. I I mean, it's, it's across the
14:10
all over the place. So anything that is sort of
14:15
aimed at solving that portion of the platform, I think is
14:20
something that I'm super interested in.
14:23
I'm also interested in the opportunities for other ways of
14:29
doing MSA or MFA like activities, but for people who
14:34
are a little bit more like some online workers who we don't have
14:36
as much control over the types of devices or the the
14:40
capabilities that they have. It's a big challenge for us.
14:44
You know, with as many, I mean, of those two and a half million
14:48
users that I talked about about being 1 1/2 to 1.6 million of
14:53
them are through crew meters. And that can range anywhere
14:57
from, you know, a 16 year old kid who's got their first job
15:01
all the way up to, you know, somebody who is working and, and
15:07
you know, they've retired and they're, they're just picking up
15:10
a few hours. You tell you that people with a
15:12
lot of disabilities well. We do, you know, so I mean the
15:17
IT, it ranges the gamut, right. You have maybe, maybe some kids
15:21
who are more familiar with, with technology, maybe probably have
15:27
a smartphone, but are, are they going to want to use it for
15:31
their job at McDonald's? And then you may have other
15:34
people who who dump they don't have any hand it's on.
15:38
Or, you know, maybe they have a, a old school mobile device that
15:44
they could do texting on. But again, like, do you know,
15:47
maybe they're in a country where they pay per text and it's like,
15:50
well, can you, you know, how do you take advantage of that?
15:53
So, you know, we're always looking for for new ways to try
15:56
and solve that problem. What's your take on solutions
15:59
like password was and I don't know hotness the best that?
16:03
I think password was is great, but it but it only really works
16:08
when when you control the devices that the that the user
16:12
has like you know, some of the some of the, you know, pass key
16:18
support. It is is really cool because it
16:21
it does kind of take away that need to a certain extent for the
16:26
user to to have a specific type of device.
16:30
You know, obviously I love Windows hello for business.
16:32
It's great on a windows windows laptop that has a hello based
16:35
camera. But again, it only works really
16:38
when you have control over that device as as the company.
16:43
So things like passkey, I think are, are really good, but still
16:48
doesn't there's a lot of scenarios where like you may
16:52
have 20 user using shared tablet in, you know, in a restaurant
16:57
that's not a managed device. It's just some, you know, an
17:02
iPad that a a franchise has gone bought or an Android tablet that
17:06
franchise has gone bought. And if they go and then try and
17:09
access any of our web application, that's, it's like,
17:12
what's, what's the way forward on, you know, they don't want,
17:16
you don't want to try and do passkeys on shared device like
17:19
that. You know, not my area of
17:21
expertise. Maybe there's a solution for
17:23
that. But I think there's still a lot
17:27
of the solutions that we see are, are really great when
17:31
you're in a a sunny day situation where all of the
17:35
pieces are aligned with, with, you know, everything that the
17:39
vendor is, is expecting. But when you when you kind of
17:43
look past that and you've got, you know, heterogeneous
17:46
environments or things seem to have control over it, it they
17:49
couldn't fall. Unhappy.
17:51
The unhappy path? Exactly.
17:52
Yeah. Yeah, I I can imagine all the
17:56
series I've worked with another large vest 2:00 to.
18:00
Fountain. Tremor and one of the biggest
18:04
problems that they were dealing with was people who were
18:08
accepted. They were supposed to start on
18:09
Wednesday and they didn't show up.
18:11
So going through that whole provision process and then, you
18:15
know, basically they had to design the process from avoiding
18:19
that being a big catastrophe because it happened all the
18:22
time. Yeah, I'm sure you guys deal
18:24
with that. Oh, yeah, you know, I mean,
18:27
it's, it's definitely a challenge that we, we see in our
18:30
restaurants as well. You know, I mean, if you think
18:32
about it, I, I, I, it's been a long time, but I can remember
18:35
when I was a 16 year old kid, you know, a lot of times you go
18:38
out there, hey, I, I got to get a job and I go and apply for
18:43
like, I don't know, three or four different jobs and
18:47
whichever one of them calls me back first, yeah, I'm going to
18:51
go talk to them. But then the next day some other
18:53
company calls and says, Oh yeah, we'll give you $0.25 more an
18:56
hour that then McDonald's is going to give you.
18:59
So then you just don't show up for, for your first day, right.
19:03
Yeah. It's, you know, it's interesting
19:06
the, you know, when you're in a more corporate setting, a lot of
19:14
things are a little bit more standardized and they, they work
19:19
how you expect that to work. You know, when people apply for
19:22
a job and they get higher than they show up for their first day
19:25
and, and everything kind of follows the hobby path, as you
19:30
said. But when, you know, when you
19:32
start to get into, you know, retail pipe establishments, it
19:38
gets a lot more dicey in terms of how that all works.
19:41
So we have to definitely desire our, our processes to account
19:46
for that and, and you know. I would imagine it's a scenario
19:51
used the term a lot. I am heroes.
19:54
When you have that kind of distributed operation like
19:57
McDonald's, it probably comes back to somebody actually really
20:02
carrying this in this location. Or even when I'm your team who
20:05
just like goes the extra mile to make it work, make it happen.
20:10
Yeah. I mean, we've, we've done a lot
20:12
of work within our platform to try to address some of the
20:17
unique business scenarios for McDonald's.
20:22
You know that I mentioned before that I had built sort of what
20:26
became part of the platform, but it's basically a web-based
20:30
portal that is almost a a custom review into the identity
20:37
platform for each of our restaurant organizations.
20:41
So if if I were a franchise at A at McDonald's that I own several
20:46
restaurants, my team and I could go into this portal and could
20:52
see all of the user accounts that belong to my restaurants
20:56
can do things like reset passwords, can reset the MFA for
21:01
our users, can give them access to various different
21:05
applications. And the the nice thing about
21:09
that is where we allow the people who are closest to the
21:14
users to be able to try and solve those problems for them
21:20
versus making them call a help desk.
21:22
And you know, then how do you validate that John Smith is
21:27
actually it's. Frustrating.
21:28
We've all been through it, right?
21:29
I mean, I had to get a power ship for the group today and I
21:32
must have gone to four or five different people who say good to
21:35
that person. You go to that person, they say
21:36
good to this person, eventually get to the right person.
21:39
But by the time you do, it can be pretty.
21:43
You can be already pretty frustrated and pretty angry at
21:46
the whole process, and there's somebody you want to put your
21:49
users through. Yeah.
21:50
And and I think you know what we've found is that a lot of
21:54
this sort of traditional identity management tooling
21:59
works really well when you're talking about a traditional sort
22:03
of enterprise scenario. But when you have a situation
22:09
like ours where we have really hugely distributed fire, like we
22:14
have 40,000 restaurants worldwide and basically every
22:17
one of those restaurants is its own little business.
22:21
You know, I mean, yes, some of our franchisees own multiple
22:23
restaurants, but ultimately each one of those restaurants
22:27
operates sort of independently of each other, you know, really.
22:30
Is that always almost always the case?
22:32
Well, so I think it's something like 93% of our restaurants
22:36
worldwide are owned by a franchise or, or a licensee of
22:41
some sort of McDonald's. McDonald's I think only operates
22:44
about 7% of our, our restaurants ballpark.
22:50
I, I don't know what the numbers are.
22:51
They change over time as, as we buy and sell restaurants.
22:54
But, but The thing is, yeah, you may have a, a franchise who owns
22:59
5 or 10 restaurants and they'll operate that obviously as a
23:03
single business. But the, the individual
23:05
restaurants themselves, you know, you're gonna have a
23:08
general manager and you're gonna have other managers and then
23:10
you'll have the crew and they operate that restaurant on a
23:14
day-to-day basis, sort of independently of the other
23:17
restaurants even within their franchise.
23:19
Obviously they have oversight from their their franchise
23:22
organization. But in, in terms of how those
23:27
crew members and the managers get supported, it it's done
23:30
basically at the restaurant. OK, so you know, when you if you
23:35
have a crew person who's having a problem with their identity,
23:38
the first person they're going to go to is one of their
23:39
managers. And and we need to be able to
23:43
empower those managers to be able to address and handle that
23:49
issue as quickly and as easily as possible because #1
23:56
identity's not their job as. Far as I was ready.
23:59
Their, their job is running, running the restaurant.
24:01
And so we have to streamline these things as much as we can
24:05
because they need to get back to being able to run the
24:07
restaurant, but we also don't want them to be on the phone
24:11
calling the helpdesk all day actually.
24:13
It's always been fascinated by the franchise model or the
24:18
dealership model or either brokerage model because I think
24:23
to your point earlier you were talking about with the device
24:26
that you lose control of the device.
24:28
The franchise can go out and buy Dells or they can go out and buy
24:33
whatever they want and you just deal with it, right?
24:39
And also like within that network, I own 10 restaurants.
24:42
I could, you know, have some kind of hierarchy.
24:45
I could own a lunch with restaurants.
24:47
Make be sure you have some franchisees that owe them like
24:51
hundreds of restaurants, right? Yeah, I don't know what the
24:54
exact numbers are, at least within the USI think our largest
25:00
ones are somewhere in the 50 restaurant range.
25:03
But again, I, I'm not 100% sure. You know, to some extent we we
25:09
do control the hardware within the restaurants from the
25:14
standpoint of like our point of sale systems and things like
25:18
that are, are fairly standardized.
25:20
There may be some options that the that the the franchisings
25:24
have for registers and and other types of devices.
25:30
And I think what we've tried to do over time is to sort of
25:36
provide a standard set of capabilities so that the
25:40
franchisees don't have to solve these problems themselves.
25:44
And I think we've done a pretty good job with that.
25:46
We must to the, you know, for the most part, I think in most
25:50
areas of the world, McDonald's is actually, you know, provide
25:54
not necessarily providing the hardware, but specifying and
25:59
then having partners and working with those partners to provide
26:03
those, those options to the the franchisees.
26:07
A little outside my area of expertise.
26:09
But I do know that for the most part, we standardize those
26:15
things because otherwise we, you know, we provide the point of
26:17
sale software. We would be able to to easily
26:21
support that if we were out too wide of a variation.
26:24
And you hear a question and this is probably way outside of your
26:27
expertise, but maybe you know the answer.
26:29
So when you're using a McDonald's app, you place an
26:32
order and it says your code is and it gives you a four digit
26:35
code. Yes, all right, there's.
26:37
Thousands of McDonald's or outside, right?
26:39
There's thousands of orders going in at a time.
26:42
How is a four digit code enough to know that you know this is
26:47
Jim and he ordered XY and Z? So stay on with this.
26:53
According to the fill, it only needs to apply to the location
26:55
wanting to pick it up, correct? Yeah.
26:59
So here are two smart people shorts.
27:01
Yeah. So you won't get the code until
27:04
you've submitted the ordering that the order is going to be
27:07
tied to the restaurant that you're submitting the order to.
27:11
So they really only have to support enough ongoing orders
27:15
for that one particular restaurant.
27:19
You could have theoretically and you have code collisions across
27:24
restaurants and it wouldn't, it wouldn't be a problem because on
27:28
what happens is when you give them that code, they that into
27:31
the point of sale system and the combination of the restaurant
27:35
and the code then pulls the order in on from the digital
27:40
cut. That's my understanding.
27:42
OK, that makes sense. Yeah, Four, did you go?
27:44
Wouldn't wouldn't scale, but it wouldn't.
27:47
But we, you know, it's like, how do you how do you find again?
27:50
Click, from a user experience perspective, how do you find the
27:53
right balance? Because you're reading out a,
27:59
you know, 16 digit code. Yeah.
28:03
No, no, no, that was, that was an H.
28:05
Yeah, right. H And what the hell?
28:11
Let's talk about identifies. I think we were talking before
28:15
we started. We mentioned you were here last
28:16
year. Yeah, right.
28:17
So you're sucking that nervous second.
28:19
What brought you back? I, I really enjoyed the, the
28:23
conference last year. I, I, you know, obviously I, I
28:27
love being involved in any kind of, you know, community events,
28:36
right? Obviously this is a big part of
28:38
the identity and access community and being able to
28:43
participate in these types of events to be able to come and
28:46
talk with people that are sort of working in the same industry
28:50
out like it is. Is it valuable?
28:51
Because, you know, I mean, the, the sessions are great, right?
28:55
You, you know, you get to hear it and you hear about, you know,
28:59
new things that are coming and hear how other people have
29:01
addressed problems. But even just if you were to get
29:05
together or come and talk to the people you know walking through
29:09
the the exhibit hall with the the sponsors and stuff beginning
29:14
to talk to other. Practitioners in the industry, I
29:17
think it's, it's hugely valuable just to be able to network and
29:21
and make connections. Then you start to recognize a
29:25
lot of these folks. So absolutely.
29:26
They've been here for years and years.
29:28
Or other properties. Except, yeah.
29:30
So, yeah, the, the hallway conversations are always one of
29:33
the highlights for me at least. You know, that's not something
29:35
you can replicate like let's see or a weather or something like
29:39
that. Well, and it's, it's hard too,
29:41
because even if you, even if you know and have the contact info
29:45
for, for some other people in the industry, you know, you
29:49
know, they're busy, right? And you know that they're tied
29:51
up with their own things. And we hate to kind of like
29:54
inject yourself into into their, with their daily grind.
29:59
But when everybody has taken the time to, you know, to come to a
30:04
certain place, it's a, it's an opportunity to really, you know.
30:07
Here, Yeah, Identity to meet new people, learn new things and see
30:11
new things. All that good stuff.
30:12
And we're in Vegas right up. It stays and it stays in Vegas
30:16
and then may not stay in Vegas, but.
30:18
Well, I mean, the thing that I've always enjoyed too is, you
30:20
know, I, I, I spend a lot of time on, on social media trying
30:24
to, you know, just understand what's going on and, and see
30:27
what other people are talking about.
30:30
And, and you have conversations with people on social media,
30:33
whether that be, you know, through a, a public, you know,
30:37
chat with comments or whatever, or if you're having maybe even
30:41
a, a direct private conversation.
30:43
But the relationship with that person changes drastically when
30:48
you've talked with them in person, even even if it's just
30:51
like for a few minutes. I, you know, I attended a, yeah,
30:57
I told you, I, I come from a software engineering background.
31:00
I, I have a lot of Microsoft events over the years.
31:03
And I had been chatting with a a gentleman from their identity
31:08
team for months or or even years on Twitter.
31:14
We're on the service forum announced where and we had never
31:18
met in person. And I happened to run into him
31:22
at one of the Microsoft events and we hadn't threatened 5-10
31:26
minutes. The the relationship that we
31:30
then had on Twitter subsequent to that changed drastic.
31:36
It was it was no longer just some random person that who he
31:41
was chatting with. It was somebody who he knew who
31:43
he had met. And you could tell just it that
31:48
the willingness to actually have a little bit more depth to a
31:52
conversation. So that's how it's.
31:54
Upgrading like what's rating because a lot of these conflicts
31:59
as well, you're seeing it last they used to be there was a
32:02
virtual option, right? First it was virtual only, then
32:05
it was virtual option and now you're seeing a lot of that go
32:08
away, which makes sense. You know, people who travel and
32:11
be together out. But the benefit is what you just
32:15
said, making that connection. Now you're more than just a a
32:19
picture and a a tagline on screen.
32:22
You're a person that I've had an interaction, but.
32:24
Yeah, I honestly, I really love when they, when in the
32:27
conferences do sort of a combination of virtual and in
32:31
person, because then I can go attend in person and can focus
32:34
on the networking aspects and not worry so much about the
32:38
sessions because I can always come back afterwards and watch
32:42
the sessions. Or something like this and you
32:45
go watch it. Right.
32:48
Well, because you know the what's the difference if I'm
32:51
there in person watching it or watching it or it.
32:54
But being able to go talk to people and actually have a
32:58
conversation is a lot harder to do virtual or even.
33:01
Split in between sessions, right?
33:03
You wanted, there's like four different sessions all taking
33:05
place, right, Like you want to be.
33:06
I think it should be a mandatory thing.
33:08
You know, if you're right in the conference, you should have some
33:11
sort of recording or something right, taking place where you
33:14
can watch whatever you missed. I saw somewhere out there
33:19
they're doing some sort of AI. Some are the as well around
33:22
things. I I don't know what that means,
33:24
you know, identivers now with whatever set more AI.
33:27
Mean, you know what I mean? If you slack a little AI on it,
33:30
it's gotta be. Right, Yeah, that's gotta be
33:32
better. Let's talk about your keynotes
33:35
Friday. So it's time people listen to
33:37
this that I'll probably pass a blank.
33:39
But the future of authorization, you mentioned early on
33:43
authorization what consider relations to your like a area
33:45
that needs to be solved or still an employee review on that give
33:49
us a little synopsis of what the talk about.
33:54
Yeah. So I, I will say I am, I am a
33:58
very small part of the King code.
33:59
It's mainly Sarah from AWS and and.
34:02
Peter from and Sarah's been popping her head in see us like
34:07
motioning and stuff like that. She can go across.
34:09
The I, I I actually met with Sarah earlier this morning.
34:11
I need to go over the talk and she said say hello.
34:15
But so they're, they're obviously working very, very
34:19
closely together on a lot of standards around authorization.
34:23
And I where I'm participating is I'm going to to be the problem
34:29
child. No, I'm actually going to just
34:34
talk a little bit about some of the challenges that we see at
34:36
the dolls with authorization. I, I, you know, I think I
34:39
mentioned earlier, you know, super expensive for us to
34:44
integrate allocations when it comes to authorization.
34:47
There's a, a bunch of different ways to do it and none of them
34:51
are white, but it's just we, you know, the way I'm looking at it
34:58
is if I, if I want to, if I were to have a wish, like I would
35:04
love for there to be some way to make authorization closer to as
35:11
easy as doing authentication, a lot of standards.
35:15
And yeah, I mean, it's, it's great.
35:18
You can go to a, a, a SAS vendor and say, hey, what do you, what
35:23
do you guys support for SSO? And they all go, Oh yeah, we
35:27
support open ID connect or, and, or where we support XAML and
35:32
maybe some others, but those are the two that we care about.
35:36
And you know, you plug it in, it's a little bit of work.
35:39
Sure, you know, for our team to do, you know, 30 minutes an hour
35:43
work of set up, you know, work with the the app team and, and
35:47
do some testing, make sure everything is good.
35:48
And then OK, great, you've got, you've got authentication ready
35:53
to go. But authorization is orders of
35:56
magnitude more difficult. And so the keynote really is
36:00
talking about some of the work that's being done in the
36:03
industry out trying to standardize, you know, the
36:08
authorization story. I'm not, I, I don't think we're
36:12
at a point yet where we go, hey, we have a, a solution to all of
36:16
these problems. But I I think that what we're
36:20
recognizing is we've largely solved most of the
36:23
authentication challenges. Because they're right.
36:26
Didn't face. It was that what's really
36:29
interesting, I think from an authorization standpoint is I
36:34
guess it's probably nervous. This is the first time I'm
36:36
thinking about this town where your authentication issue was
36:40
10-15 years ago. The problem, the problem is
36:45
applications are designed to be standalone, right?
36:49
Like it's, if you have a single sign on, great, we can
36:52
integrate, but you don't have to have it.
36:54
You can log in on our screen and we have these roles here, Reaps
36:59
or entitlements, whatever you want to call, but it's this
37:02
combination. And then that's what our
37:05
application expects. Now replacing authentication was
37:09
just that thin layer on top replacing authorization or not
37:13
replacing but fully integrate them to and you have N number of
37:18
applications all designed different ways.
37:21
That's it's another. Story.
37:23
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. But I, I think that the, you
37:28
know, sort of where we're at today is we're trying to solve
37:33
sort of that common language. We, we, you know, with SAML and
37:38
Oauth help, they detect, we, we have a common language that we
37:42
can use for authentication today.
37:45
And when you, when you have an application, you want to enable
37:51
it on SSO, you now have a standard, you know, you can plug
37:54
in. But you're right though, that
37:55
authorization is much more complicated because every
37:59
application does its own thing. But I think if we can get to a
38:05
common language or a common set of languages that can't be
38:10
supported, you can hopefully get the application vendors to a
38:14
point where they're starting to think about authorization in a
38:19
consistent way because you have languages that work in a certain
38:24
way. Because we didn't have those
38:27
languages, everybody was left to sort of fend for themselves in
38:31
terms of how they didn't do authorization within their app.
38:35
And of course, you know, you, you have, you know, one problem,
38:38
but 99 different ways to solve it.
38:41
We, that's kind of where we're at today.
38:43
So I think the first thing we have to do is solve the language
38:45
problem. And then once we have that and
38:48
we can show like, hey, these these identity platforms now
38:52
support these languages. Now we could start to.
38:56
Go to the offenders and say let's figure out how to get you
38:59
on board because like authentication, it will make
39:03
your life easier. It will make your customers
39:05
lives easier because they'll be able to plug in a lot better.
39:09
All the good news is that books like yourself and Not seriously
39:13
Sarah and and many, many others, I'm not going to try and go
39:16
through the whole list, but there's so many people focused
39:19
on authorization now. You didn't see that five years
39:23
ago. Yeah.
39:24
Well, I, I mean, I think if you look at it, the, the
39:27
proliferation of applications, it is contributing to this,
39:31
right. If you look 10 years ago, like
39:34
our application estate at McDonald's was much smaller.
39:38
I mean, you know, we still had a lot of applications.
39:41
We're big enterprise, but it was much smaller than it is today.
39:45
We're for over 1000 allocations. So imagine trying to integrate
39:50
1000 locations that are out doing their state, the, you
39:55
know, the their own way and and it's it's challenging.
39:59
Well, the next part of the positive assault, right, We have
40:01
fixed authentication, we're done Great.
40:03
That's nothing. If there's thought we're there,
40:06
I. Yeah.
40:07
What's next? Part of the authentication there
40:09
is the next step is authorization.
40:11
So here we are with that Frank. And you know, I I guess I'm a
40:15
little bit pessimistic because we do need outpatient developers
40:18
to get a hold of this. I don't know how we're going to
40:20
go back and retro bit without some sort of crazy little where
40:23
and there are some things that that probably not that, but
40:27
probably being at what 10-15 years from now is really when
40:31
we're going to look back on it. If we start now and say let's
40:35
start standardizing the way we do authorizations or at least
40:38
coming up with some framework, because you've got so many
40:40
different ways to do it while here.
40:42
It's transaction day, you know, maybe it's FAP, it's AT code
40:46
natural directory, it's a group and yet another application.
40:49
There is SAS days out maybe and it's this is the entitlement,
40:52
right? I just I I wish it would be get
40:55
better faster, but the realist did me and the pessimist side of
41:00
me looks as like probably in a 10 to 15 year I was absent to
41:03
pinch up I. Mean, I think, I think you're
41:05
probably right to get to the point where we're at today with
41:10
authentication in terms of being able to say it's largely a
41:15
solved album, right? Authentication, but we're not
41:18
going to say like it's solved everywhere and for every
41:20
scenario. But by and large, we can look at
41:25
it and go, well, hey, you know what, there's common tooling,
41:28
there's common standards that people can use to plug in.
41:32
And it's largely a solved problem from a technical
41:35
perspective. Now, maybe not everything, but
41:37
using it or maybe there's some edge cases.
41:40
So I think you're probably right.
41:41
But I, I, I think there's a lot of value even in if, if you were
41:48
to get commonly accepted standards for authorization and
41:55
you were to get the identity platforms to support it and even
41:59
some of the large vectors to support it, which is probably
42:04
what you'll get early on. There's going to be a long tail
42:08
right of, of applications, how long it takes them to, to, you
42:13
know, to bring out support for it.
42:16
But I think, you know, even if you can get some of the major
42:20
players on board that there's a lot of huge value to that,
42:26
especially when you talk about enterprise type, you know,
42:30
regulatory type applications, if you could get that on board,
42:36
there's huge value for for, you know, for industry for that so.
42:42
You've got another step coming up this week because you're busy
42:45
the way One McDonald's Way, the global identity and access
42:48
journey at McDonald's. What's that about?
42:51
Yeah. So McDonald's, you know, we,
42:55
we're in 115 markets and historically McDonald's sort of
42:59
operated as 115 different businesses.
43:04
I, you know, I mentioned that I've been with McDonald's for a
43:06
long time. I actually started incorporated
43:08
in 2000. And when I started, there was no
43:11
global IT. There was corporate IT, which
43:15
was focused on like a mainframe and our financial systems for,
43:21
you know, how the corporation rang.
43:23
And then every market had their own IT, you know, from the US
43:28
market, which had a fairly sizable you IT because they're
43:31
like a third of our restaurants. But he had some markets that
43:35
it's like one guy in a in a closet somewhere around IT
43:39
through the entire market because they're a small in
43:42
market, but every market did the relative there.
43:45
There was no, we didn't have a global identity platform.
43:48
In fact, when when I was fairly new, I think I was made counting
43:54
a year in, we rolled out the first global identities because
44:02
we were trying to roll out an extramat and realize that we
44:07
didn't have an identity that everybody could use to sign in
44:12
to this this website that we were going to use to disseminate
44:16
defamation of. I see that a lot actually.
44:19
It's like this, this idea of digital transformation driving a
44:24
lot of standardized identity approaches down that seems like
44:28
that kind of also. Yeah, because this it's when you
44:30
get to the point what George Lee just described me where realist.
44:34
Oh, oh, that's actually they call that identity and access
44:40
mentor. OK.
44:40
Yeah, we need that. Well, The funny thing is, I mean
44:43
even at that point we rolled out sort of a new identity platform,
44:49
but all of the markets still manage their identity platform
44:52
for their local applications for their local PCs, etcetera.
44:57
So we had for this dichotomy of the the global platform, which
45:03
only got you into this extranet and subsequently any
45:08
applications that sort of tied in to that same platform.
45:12
But how people logged into their PCs was a completely different
45:16
ID. So you had people with two
45:17
different IDs with two different passwords.
45:19
And eventually some of our, like the US market and corporate
45:25
said, Oh well, since we're running both of these things,
45:28
why don't we synchronize the password between the two, but
45:31
you still had two different IDs. And technically 2 still
45:35
passwords, but it was it was wise I think.
45:38
Exactly. But, but it was literally one
45:41
was in Active Directory and one was in like Nobel identity
45:45
manager directory. But yeah, they were, they were
45:49
synchronizing passwords. So at that point we, we still
45:54
had effectively 100 and 15120 different ways of doing I, I got
46:00
right. You had a central team that
46:01
managed the global identity portion, but that wasn't really
46:05
a global identity platform because it was really used for
46:08
accessing one's websites. Over time, we got some of our
46:12
major markets sort of standardized on a single Active
46:17
Directory. But it, it took us up until end
46:24
of 2022 to actually get everybody on to a standard
46:29
platform right through the same business processes, same
46:33
identity life cycle processes and everything.
46:36
But we, we really kicked that up process off in 2019.
46:41
And over the course of four years, we onboarded 100 markets
46:46
and something like almost 2,000,000 user IDs on platform
46:51
in like 4 years. So that's what my talk is going
46:55
to be about is really just kind of talking through what that
46:57
process looked like, how we did it, how we structured the
47:00
program to actually do that. Because it, it was an insane
47:06
amount of work to try and work with all of these different
47:08
markets to bring them on board. And we obviously couldn't do it
47:13
in a custom way for every single market 'cause there was no way
47:17
we could do it. And then, you know, I'll talk
47:20
through a a few of the lessons learned and and sort of what's
47:24
next for from a top. Didn't stop.
47:27
We've been timing here about 45 minutes kind of the call before
47:31
the store of identivers. It's, you know, 10:20 AM the
47:36
next time because the people kind of coming and goings we're
47:39
kind of like wouldn't look at doing that room right.
47:40
Like the actual conference technically, I guess starts
47:45
tonight with the the keynote. So we want to let you get on and
47:49
at least get an app in or shenanigans starter right here.
47:54
Would you say that the sausage, egg and cheese that griddle is
47:59
the pinnacle of McDonald's innovation?
48:02
So pinnacle of McDonald's innovation.
48:06
Because I could tell you right now, I think it is.
48:08
I don't know how you beat that. So I will say my kids love the
48:14
sausage, egg and cheese McGraw that is by far their favorite
48:18
breakfast. I'm I'm more of a breakfast
48:22
burrito kind of guy myself, 'cause you know what?
48:27
What could be better than eggs and sausage and Peppers and.
48:31
Roll well and thy and Gia Olivia bell salsa.
48:33
And you know their skin correctly.
48:35
Yeah. I mean, you know, the the little
48:38
syrup injected pancake. I I done it.
48:42
I mean it, it literally is a whole breakfast in one thing
48:46
accelerated. So yeah, I could, I could see
48:49
that. I I could I could agree with
48:51
that statement. What do you say to someone when
48:55
they've never been to McDonald's and say what's the thing that
48:58
they should try? It what?
49:00
And then really he. Who is this right?
49:03
Actually, that's not sure if he likes this.
49:07
And I guess so, I think you got to go with the classics, right?
49:12
If if, if you're talking about breakfast, you got, you got to
49:15
try the egg, you know? I'm not a guy too plain.
49:19
Yeah. I I mean a lot of them as a kid,
49:22
but now that you have the like red egg griddle, I mean, and,
49:26
and by the way, it doesn't have to be just sausage.
49:27
I mean, anything you put on Mcgriddle, that's wonderful.
49:32
Yeah, I mean, honestly, you could really try it for
49:34
breakfast because the breakfast menu is awesome.
49:36
I I'd miss all day breakfast, but obviously.
49:41
And for lunch, you got to try the fries.
49:43
Yeah, I mean, there's just no two ways around powder fries and
49:47
I would say our poor powder of cheese because.
49:50
My daughter cooking, you know, we, we switched over.
49:52
To fresh beef for Kurt Carver cheese a number of years ago and
49:57
it's like that day you. I mean, the quality of the fresh
50:03
beef versus the frozen beef is just, I mean, frozen beef is
50:06
good. It's good quality.
50:08
It's just there's something about the and fresh.
50:11
Bamboos Crispy Chicken Deluxe is playing too.
50:14
So how? Here's what for you.
50:17
Overrated or underrated fish for legs out?
50:22
I get to say overrated because I don't like fish very much.
50:26
Not at all. But I I do know that there are
50:29
lots of people that level then. It's probably underrated, I
50:33
never get it but. Just wait a second.
50:36
How can you how can you say it's underrated?
50:38
I. Don't have to met that many
50:39
people that like it. OK.
50:41
So I think like the rating is very low.
50:43
That is, among society, going to be better than we as fish.
50:48
We sound an awful lot but. It's just when I get to
50:50
McDonald's, I'm. Like well.
50:52
Serve things and fish sandwich doesn't come to mind for me, but
50:57
yeah and they could probably. And it's it's the only sandwich
51:01
we have that uses a steamed butt.
51:05
All of our other sandwiches use toasted butts.
51:08
OK, but the fish filet has a steamed butt.
51:14
And now we're getting. I don't know, I mean I'd have to
51:16
go back and look at the history, but yeah, there's something
51:19
about the IT makes it like super pillowy and a cow.
51:26
I guess maybe because the fish is kind of a lighter, a lighter
51:31
protein versus lighter chicken. It's are more dense And so
51:36
because the the fish is is lighter to fluff.
51:41
I'd have to have to ask by my buddy chef Mike her ass.
51:46
I think it's how he pronounced his last name.
51:47
He's a he's a former McDonald's chef and he he's out on social
51:51
media answering all the McDonald's questions.
51:53
So. I'd be a good one for throwing
51:55
out TikTok, for example. Yeah, exactly.
51:57
That's a good like, you know, pub trivia quiz.
52:01
Like what is the only McDonald's item that does not have a
52:04
toasted rifle? No.
52:06
Yeah, that will do all right. What do you think?
52:11
Should we wrap it up there? I think we should wrap it up.
52:13
We, I mean, we can't take up too much George's time.
52:15
Together. Just get out there.
52:17
This day I didn't burst ahead, Yeah.
52:19
I appreciate you guys have. Yeah, Thank you so much for
52:21
taking the title class. And Yep, we'll see you walk in
52:25
the halls and we'll be doing the same thing.
52:27
So that's appreciating time. Yeah, thank you.
52:30
All right, so we'll go ahead and make it there for this
52:32
conversation, I think. So this was kind of kick off
52:34
with our Identitors 2024 series. It's a plan I think right now is
52:39
episodes pretty much all looks that sweet as I get back to get
52:43
things out of there and kind of pushed out the door, but that
52:47
was it. So our first four range of
52:49
video, we got cameras, we got some microphones, we got open
52:52
door. People were kind of coming in
52:54
and that way. How do I say was it on there?
52:59
So, you know, do a live if they say the biz, but go ahead of the
53:04
hands. Come on in.
53:06
Then listen to us like subscribe.
53:08
We're building up a YouTube channel.
53:10
So I know Jim was very interested in making sure that
53:13
the YouTube log out. If you didn't know it's going on
53:15
to have it, it's ready. I was ready.
53:17
So youtube.com slash at IDAC Podcast brings you to our
53:22
channel, our website, idacpodcast.com or Twitter or X
53:27
whatever, all display them at IDAC podcast, Mastodon, IDAC
53:33
podcast at info setup dot exchange.
53:35
And yeah, we're on LinkedIn, George.
53:37
We'll have your LinkedIn as well in our showdown so that people
53:40
can reach out. Awesome.
53:41
Yeah, either do get grease over your your McDonald's items or
53:46
commiserate the unauthorization stuff and, and things like that.
53:49
So with that, go ahead and leave it big star watching and or
53:53
listening. And we'll talk to Dell on the
53:54
next talk. You've been listening to
53:59
Identity at the Center. We hope you've enjoyed the show.
54:03
Make sure to like, rate and review, and we'll be back soon.
54:08
But in the meantime, hit the website at
54:10
identity@thecenter.com. See you next time on Identity at
54:16
the Center.