EDUCAUSE Live! Spotlight

Identity and access management (IAM) at USC has been a policy-driven, grassroots effort for the past five years. During that time collaborative committees with representatives from many academic and administrative units have enabled the accelerated growth of applications relying on identity data while governing the release of that data. With the backing of the university data stewards in the offices of the registrar, provost, and personnel services , policies have been implemented regarding the release of identifying sensitive information to both internal departments and external vendors. The speakers will discuss the composition of these committees, the governance policies that have been implemented, and some of the dozens of applications that have been enabled securely through this process.

Indiana University and Purdue University recently asked the Indiana General Assembly to create the Indiana Innovation Alliance. This purpose of the alliance is to expand research in the life sciences and also to improve public health.

In this session we will talk about identity management in the context of this announcement and how it relates to the values that are driving the mission of Indiana University today. Our primary focus will be the partnership between Indiana University and Clarian Health and the challenges faced by doctors, nurses, and medical students who constantly float across organizational boundaries.

Stanford University's registrar and IT strategist discuss their vision of the future of identity management in higher education. Tom Black and Bruce Vincent will give some progressive perspectives on how their roles complement each other in supporting not only admissions processes but a lifelong relationship between students and universities.

MCommunity is a new enterprise directory and identity management system under development at the University of Michigan, a large, decentralized institution. MCommunity will provide a central infrastructure that can be used not only for central IT service provisioning but also for service provisioning within units. Planning for and development of MCommunity is a collaborative effort across both U-M IT units and the many units that will use the new system.

MCommunity will allow the university to know who is and is not a member of the U-M community, enabling central university offices as well as departments, schools, colleges, and campuses to grant and remove access to online resources as needed and appropriate. It will provide identity management, roles management, data sharing and reconciliation, and directory services for U-M. MCommunity will bring together data from multiple institutional sources and will organize, present, and secure the data in a way that is particularly well suited to managing access to university resources.

The meaning of "student" is evolving at Duke University in response to many institutional and faculty outreach efforts. This trend is mirrored at many of Duke’s peer institutions. We see the concept of "learners" expanding beyond traditionally enrolled college students to include community participants, youth enrolled in talent programs, and continuing education students. At the same time, the realm of academic services faculty use for teaching has grown beyond traditional institutionally provided services such as Blackboard to encompass Flickr, blogs, Twitter, and any new technology available to faculty for free. How can we address the expansion in student population and in resources? How do you extend your institution’s computing resources to people outside your campus? How do you extend your local service concepts and policies to the end-user commodity-driven applications that are within any faculty’s reach? Lynne O'Brien and Klara Jelinkova will discuss the issues, concepts, and solutions surrounding identity management proposed and implemented at Duke University.

With demands for identity and access management (IAM) paralleling the explosive growth in online interactions, it is imperative that existing business systems, infrastructure, planning, and technologies evolve to keep pace with the access needs of the future. Recognizing the importance of developing a comprehensive, forward-looking strategy to deal with this issue, the IAM initiative was formed by Kevin Morooney, vice provost for information technology, in April 2007. The group comprises 27 individuals who span many administrative areas at the university. The group is co-chaired by Renee Shuey, Information Technology Services (ITS) and Joel Weidner, Auxiliary and Business Services.

The group's primary charge was to create an IAM road map (or strategy) for Penn State. A secondary goal was to establish a community of people and organizations from across the university who understand each other's pressures, needs, and desires for developing an IAM infrastructure that will support and enhance academic, research, business, and collaborative processes.

Using the University employee self-service application as an example, we will discuss the organizational, political, and operational challenges that are being faced in the creation of UCTrust, the University of California's federated identity management infrastructure, including the evolving roles of application owners, identity providers, and audit.

Using the identity life cycle of the Cornell student as a use case, we will discuss the value of approaching identity management as a collective responsibility. The business and IT sides of the house must partner to meet rising expectations for streamlined access to information in a world where services are distributed not only across multiple campus units but also across multiple institutions.