Boards Want Proof, Not Hype: Using Access Data To Validate AI And Security Investments
Fran Rosch is the CEO of Imprivata, a digital identity company for life- and mission-critical industries.
Access management is evolving from a traditional security gatekeeper to a strategic enabler of measurable business value. AI and cybersecurity investments are under sharper scrutiny than ever. Leadership and investors alike are demanding more than just a theoretical promise. They want proof of real, profit-driving impact grounded in operational data. In fact, 83 percent of senior business leaders said their organization’s AI adoption would be faster if they had stronger data infrastructure in place.
Workflows offer a critical lens into technology adoption, effectiveness and utilization. From onboarding new hires to building new products, users interact with various tools and systems that generate a massive (and often overlooked) stream of operational data. This data reveals how work actually gets done across the business. Yet, in many organizations, this data is underutilized.
While established as security necessities, access management solutions are now being reevaluated for their strategic value. The granular data about user workflows that these platforms capture uniquely positions them to deliver actionable insights that improve productivity, reduce friction and accelerate innovation.
User Workflows: A Hidden Source Of Insight
Whenever an employee logs into a system, requests a file, accesses a workstation or switches between applications, they contribute to a broader map of how work moves through the organization. These actions leave behind detailed data trails that reveal user behaviors, access patterns, resource dependencies and collaboration habits.
Individually, these data points may seem mundane. But when aggregated and analyzed, they show meaningful trends, including:
• The applications and devices that are central to daily work and the ones that get little use.
• Potential barriers that create delays and slow down processes.
• The extent to which teams collaborate or work in silos
• The bottlenecks that exist when provisioning tools and information.
This data represents the operational reality of how an organization functions. It provides the necessary context to assess model performance beyond benchmarks or siloed metrics. Yet few businesses are effectively capturing this data in a systematic, scalable way, even as stakeholders demand proof of outcomes.
Access Management: A Window Into The Workflow
Access management platforms are ideally suited to collect this type of workflow data. By design, they monitor and control access to systems, applications and data, logging who requests, receives or gets denied access and under what circumstances. In doing so, they accumulate a treasure trove of operational metadata:
• Behavioral insights: Who is using which systems, and how frequently?
• Resource utilization: Are licenses or tools being used?
• Process visibility: How long does it take for permissions to be approved or denied?
• Cross-functional patterns: Which teams regularly seek access to each other’s data or tools?
With access management, what was once just audit data for compliance purposes becomes a dynamic, real-time record of activity, adoption and alignment for AI and security investments.
Turning Data Into Operational Intelligence
The real value of access management data lies in the ability to analyze information to effectively drive actionable insights. Modern platforms use analytics, automation and AI to surface patterns, identify inefficiencies and recommend improvements. These insights empower IT, security and business leaders to make smarter, faster decisions based on how people actually work.
One of the most compelling advantages of leveraging access management for workflow intelligence is that the infrastructure is already in place. Organizations don’t need to implement a new system or introduce a new data source. They simply need to extract more value from the access tools they already use. Access management becomes a lightweight but powerful way to deliver measurable value (and demonstrate it) across the business.
But that’s only possible if organizations unify their access landscape. Siloed tools create blind spots, incomplete insights and inconsistent enforcement. A consolidated approach ensures consistent data, scalable visibility and clearer reporting for both operational leaders and external stakeholders.
Driving Innovation And Breaking Down Silos
Workflow inefficiency isn’t just a productivity issue—it constrains innovation. When security friction, manual approvals or redundant requests bog down a team, their capacity to operate at their full potential is reduced. With access intelligence in place, organizations can streamline permissions to enable faster cross-functional collaboration, automate low-risk access to avoid bottlenecks while maintaining control and accelerate onboarding.
Access data also tells the story of how departments and teams interact. If marketing consistently needs access to sales tools, or if finance regularly requests analytics data and performance dashboards, these patterns suggest opportunities to reduce friction and foster better collaboration. By rethinking access as both a control mechanism and an enabler of connection, organizations can use these insights to inform organizational design and team structures, prioritize integration and tool alignment and create intuitive access models aligned with actual workflows. The result is fewer barriers, faster execution and better alignment across functions.
This shift from control toward enablement mirrors what leaders, boards and investors now expect from cybersecurity and AI alike: protection and performance.
In a business environment where every dollar spent must be justified, access data offers visibility and validation.
The question isn’t whether access management can support this transformation. It’s whether organizations are prepared to leverage it as a strategic tool for demonstrating value at the pace and scale today’s world demands.
Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?