Control Architecture Institute — Strategic Advisory for Identity & Access

The Approach

Strategic advisory, capped on purpose.

The Control Architecture Institute exists to give identity and access leaders a clear-eyed, structural view of where their program stands — and where it should go next. Engagements are deliberately small in number, sized for depth rather than throughput.

The work covers workforce, customer, machine, and AI-agent identity; runtime authorization; identity threat detection and response; and the architectural choices that determine whether the next five years compound or fragment.

What it is not: implementation, configuration, audit, or RFP support. There is no vendor sponsorship and no paid placement. The advice carries weight precisely because the boundaries are clear and the calendar is capped.

A typical engagement is a small number of strategic sessions per year, anchored on the questions the leadership team actually needs to answer — and structured to produce decisions, not deliverables.

I.

Neutral by construction

No vendor sponsorship. No paid placements. No RFP participation. The conversation is free of the incentives that bend most advisory work.

II.

Structurally grounded

Recommendations are anchored in a coherent reference for the discipline — so findings are reproducible, defensible, and comparable across engagements.

III.

Capped and focused

A limited number of advisory days per year, across a small set of anchor categories. The cap protects the depth that makes the advice worth having.

The Principal

Three decades of practice. Thousands of conversations.

Homan Farahmand

Founder & Principal Advisor

Thirty-six years of experience in the technology industry, with deep specialization in identity and access. More than three thousand executive advisory discussions over the last decade. Roughly forty published long-form research reports.

Previously VP & Analyst and IAM content lead at Gartner for Technical Professionals, and conference chair of the Gartner IAM Summit (North America) in 2024 and 2025. Earlier, led Gartner's global IAM consulting practice and the Security & Risk practice in financial services, following work at Burton Group, META Group, and GE Capital IT Solutions.

Current focus: governable AI-agent ecosystems — identity issuance, authentication, authorization, delegation, federation, and observability for systems where agents are first-class actors.

Begin a Conversation

The conversation starts with a structural question.

info@controlarch.org