Identity Management

Identity Management starts with the business valuation of viewing person information as a valuable resource. It therefore seeks to maintain person information in a secure, yet universally accessable person registry, so that permitted people and applications within and beyond the organization can make use of the data. Identity Management (IdM) includes the business processes, policies, and technologies necessary to leverage person information to enable the Virtual Enterprise.

IMT is greatly in need of a comprehensive Identity Management Initiative to address the complete Identity Life-cycle of our constituents. Knowing who are customers are, even as they change affiliations with the University over time, is essential to the success of our self-service initiatives. Furthermore proper management of groups as they are reflected by the business processes of the university, as well as the grouping of customers by activity, is critical to enabling collaboration and knowledge management. This is the problem with IdM, and other middleware efforts, they are the foundation on which so many other more visible initiatives depend, e-business, Enterprise Content Management (ECM), and distance education to name a few, but are hard to appreciate as adding business value independently of such projects. So perhaps APU should continue to make advances with IdM as attached to other projects which demand it, but perhaps a focused initiative will be required to address the business process change in how we manage our most critical data set, our people.