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Case Study
Corralling Identity Management
8/22/2008
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William Schneider, identity management team lead, said the purpose of his group is to manage the identity and access infrastructure, which consists of multiple ID management systems, many of the enterprise directories, and the Center's public key infrastructure.
Individuals within the HSC community, which includes about 3,775 students and a staff and faculty of nearly 4,440 in eight different schools, may go through multiple roles during their time with the Center. A student, for example, may achieve an MD, then transition into a residency and perhaps eventually become a member of the faculty. Often the same person may be an employee, faculty member, and student simultaneously.
"The identity management system ties all that together," said Schneider. "It makes it such that you could have the same e-mail, password, and inbox throughout that entire lifecycle."
The Center has five "systems of record": the human resources system, which resides in PeopleSoft; the student information system, maintained in a DB2 database running a mainframe emulator on the front end; a resident system, called Graduate Medical Education Information System (GMEIS), basically, an HR system that does evaluations, duty hours, and rotations and scheduling; an HR system for the Faculty Practice Plan for the Center's physicians; and a guest database for anybody not in any of the other four categories.
A First Attempt at Identity Management
In the past, that wealth of data from multiple sources posed several challenges. There was no simple way to know which data store to use when a person was maintained in more than one. Likewise, it was hard to reconcile those five systems in order to do a match to determine if an individual in one was the same as the individual in another.
University of Texas guidelines mandate that the Center assign a persistently unique identifier to a single individual forever, explained Schneider. Yet those same guidelines say that a social security number can't be used--unless it's collected for another purpose, such as employment. So those linkages needed to be created in some other way.
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