I’ve often lamented the lack of an Identity and Access Management program at Miami, but why? And just what is IAM anyway? The short story is that IAM is the business process of knowing who you have relationships with and managing what services they have access to. IAM is not a technical problem and can’t be solved by the technology group. Identity starts with the areas responsible for relationships, such as the Registrar and HR. Access management is then a collaboration between identity managers and service managers.
Why is this something I keep bringing up? Miami has a homegrown solution for creating and managing accounts. Real Time Account Gen and the Nightly Account Gen process play roles in provisioning, updating and eventually removing accounts. A decade ago, this process put us ahead of most peer institutions. Unfortunately, the needs of our customers have outpaced our ability to deliver in the IAM space. The institution continues to add new relationships and services but the fundamental processes for managing accounts has not changed with the demand.
Consider the growing list off offices managing identity and access:
- HR
- Admission
- Registrar
- Graduate School
- Bursar
- Parents Office
- Alumni
- Life Long Learning
Then combine this with the growing list of services we have to manage access to, an increasing number of which are in the cloud:
- Active Directory
- OpenLDAP
- Google Apps
- Open Two Factor
- Cbord
- Chalk and Wire
- myMiami
- BuyWay
- Niihka
- any number of services that use group membership or directory attributes for authorization
The people responsible for the care and feeding of the account management processes deal with problems and change requests on a weekly basis. In the recent months, we have created new groups to manage access for users and added three new services. We’ve dealt with problems resulting from winter term, cleanup of the previous year’s accepted students and the consequences of fixing a bug that a certain constituent group was unknowingly relying on to get service. This is only a small sample of the ever growing list.
I don’t believe that the demand and rate of change will slow down. Electronic services and relationships are the future of every part of Miami and the needs for customer access will only increase. While Miami may not be able to take on an IAM program right now, we should all be laying the groundwork for such a program in the future.