I'm at the Catalyst Conference in San Diego this week - say "Hi!" if you see me wondering the halls - but the news from the show will have to wait until next week's newsletters. Today I want to finish something I touched on recently - provisioning/de-provisioning in the education sector.

No sooner had that newsletter gone out than eagle-eyed PR exec Danielle Mancano (Sr. Account Executive, SHIFT Communications – representing Novell) was on to me about a very successful deployment Novell had in the education area.

As the story goes, each summer the Cobb County School District, the second-largest school system in Georgia, has hired contractors to manually create and update approximately 125,000 existing students, transfer students and staff accounts. Often, this initiative would last well into October and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Not only was it a challenge to manually update and create user identities, but Cobb County also stored user information in a variety of applications and operating systems, which made identity management very complex.

As one example of the savings, Danielle mentioned that:
“…students trying to log in to the system to check their grades and access e-mail, received a single ID and password. In the past, one administrator spent the first two weeks of the school year resetting passwords for students who stood in line during class breaks. By eliminating the manual work, Cobb County has saved an estimated $150,000 per year, and can automatically provision users in minutes, rather than months.”

But the telling point, for me, was this quote (from Chris Ragsdale, CTO of Cobb County School District) which Danielle forwarded to me: “…this solution has paid for itself in no time. We avoided hiring costly temporary workers to create and update user accounts at the start of the school year, and for the first time in County history we had all registered students in our identity infrastructure before school started.”

As I’ve learned from a number of you, the bottom line appears much more important (as opposed to productivity, efficiency or even security) in the education market. The Cobb County experience shows that you can increase productivity, efficiency and security and improve the bottom line at the same time.

Dave Kearns is a consultant and editor of IdM, the Journal of Identity Management.