Why do IAM implementations stall?

First, connector economics: vendor connectors cover the popular SaaS layer, and everything else — homegrown, legacy, on-prem — costs bespoke engineering per app. Second, services economics: implementation is billed by effort, so cost scales linearly with coverage while budgets do not; Way Security cites services running three to five times the software cost. Third, drift: reorgs, M&A and app churn reopen completed work, so programs run to stand still.

Ruthless prioritization helps, but the structural fix is changing the effort model: letting an automation platform perform onboarding, policy rollout and remediation as continuous product behavior instead of billable project phases. That converts the long tail from a budget question into a throughput question — and keeps operating after the consultants leave.