Aligning identity with business goals

You’ve heard it before. Maybe you’ve even said it: “We need identity to align with business goals.” It sounds good. Strategic, even. But here’s the problem—what do we mean when we say “business goals”? Because too often, what we actually mean is operations. And those are not the same thing.
Let’s break this down.

It’s not about the org chart

When folks say “business goals,” they might point to the CIO’s roadmap or the COO’s quarterly objectives, key results (OKRs), or V2MOM measures. That’s important work, but it’s not the same as business goals.

Building a secure internal payroll tool to protect sensitive data is necessary and smart. But it’s not tied to “growing market share by 10%.” It’s compliance, risk mitigation, or maybe modernization, not product launch, revenue growth, or user acquisition.

That distinction matters.

CIAM is the exception

In CIAM, identity is the business. Seamless onboarding, frictionless login, data privacy controls, and most importantly getting the individual to the awesome that the business offers—those are core to customer experience, brand trust, and ultimately, the bottom line. So yes, in CIAM, identity folks can and should say: “We’re aligned with business goals.”

But in the workforce world? You’re often not in the room when the real priorities are set. You’re probably not the first call when someone’s building a new app. That’s okay, but let’s not pretend you are.

So what do you do?

Become an embedded journalist

To really align identity work with business goals, you need to get curious. Think like an embedded journalist. That means sitting with product teams and chatting with legal. You’ll eavesdrop (politely) on marketing to learn what they care about, how they talk about success, and what keeps them up at night.

Why do all this? Because the people deciding what gets funded don’t care about the boxes and arrows in an elegant identity architecture. They don’t speak identity jargon at all. They speak revenue, growth, customer satisfaction, and market penetration.

If you want your identity program to get prioritized, you have to translate. You have to disguise your roadmap inside theirs.

The art of the Trojan Feature

Your future-proofed, standards-based, decentralized identity architecture? Yeah, nobody’s budgeting for that. Not this quarter. Maybe not ever. But a business unit that needs to comply with data residency regulations in a new region? That’s a real goal, and it’s one you can help with.

So instead of asking them to care about your long-term infrastructure goals, you take their ask… and quietly bundle in the building blocks of your vision. Want to expand to LATAM? Great. You’ll need to federate with new partners and manage local consent flows. Lucky for them, you were already working on the tech to do that. And now, it’s a business priority.

That’s alignment.

Don’t fight the elephant

Here’s the part nobody likes to say out loud: large organizations optimize for performance culture, especially today. That means short-term wins. Local wins. The next quarter, not the next decade. You can either fight that or work with it.

The best identity practitioners I know are deeply connected across the enterprise. They don’t try to argue people out of their business goals. They find ways to help people meet those goals using identity infrastructure that also moves their vision and our field forward.

We like to think of ourselves as the architects of the future. But sometimes, the most effective identity work happens quietly, behind the scenes, enabling others to shine. That’s how you earn trust. That’s how you get invited back.

And that’s how you build the future in alignment with the business.