The IAM journey continues down the road to maturity
Here are a few things the IAM team has been working at now that we don’t just have to keep the lights on!
The IAM journey continues down the road to maturity
Earlier this year, the Fates (the team tasked with improving our identity and access management environment and practices) spent some time putting together an updated forecast for our IAM program. This roadmap allows the team to focus their efforts on various buckets of work as the program continues to mature. The deployment of our identity governance and administration tool, RapidIdentity, has taken up most of our time over the last couple of years, but lately, the focus has shifted to incremental improvements and quality-of-life fixes.
Here are a few things the IAM team has been working at now that we don’t just have to keep the lights on!
1. Preparing for the addition of new sources of authority
The old adage is that one of the only constants in life is change—and that’s doubly true at Miami and especially from a technology perspective. The Fates are preparing for a couple of new platforms to come online that will eventually feed data through the identity system: Workday Student and Slate for Advancement.
2. Creating a unified support tool (IAM Portal)
Right now, support teams use a tool called Real Time FindUser to look up key information about folks who need assistance. Unfortunately, RTFU is dependent on Banner data, and as we move toward a Workday-only world in terms of sources of authority, we needed to do something to help support teams. The decision was made to replace the app’s functionalities with the already-extant IAM Portal (which is a separate tool from RI).
3. Modest list of “just-do-it” activities
On top of support work and getting ready for Slate and Workday Student, the team has a list of easy wins that have been labeled as “just-do-it” activities, including things like adding custom email template attributes in RI and building out documentation. They have also been working diligently on efficiency-improving code changes that speed up processing times and help data flow more smoothly through the growing network of systems attached to the identity infrastructure.
The team is even slated to present a poster at this year’s Educause conference in Nashville, Tennessee, during the last week of October!
Where we’re going, we don’t need roads…
…But it’s nice to have a map of where we want to end up. The Fates work hard to strengthen our technological environment such that our identity and access management practices are more in line with industry standards. We’re grateful for all their hard work and are excited to see what they work on next!
