Canada’s University of British Columbia is a large, multi-campus institution. There are two major campuses: Vancouver, located at the western tip of the Point Grey Peninsula, close to the city of Vancouver; and Okanagan, in the growing city of Kelowna, in British Columbia’s beautiful Okanagan Valley. There are also two smaller campuses: Robson Square, located in the heart of downtown Vancouver; and The Great Northern Way Campus, located just southeast of the downtown Vancouver core. The University’s Faculty of Medicine’s Education Across British Columbia project maintains 75 healthcare facilities, including 22 large tertiary and medium regional hospitals, provide clinical education opportunities for both undergraduate and postgraduate medical students.
A few years ago the university found itself (as did many organizations) in a situation where students, faculty and staff were faced with an increasing plethora of systems, accounts, usernames, passwords and access rules as part of an ongoing challenge to balance access and security needs. Some of the specific challenges that UBC’s IT department identified included:
• Providing ever-extending access to information systems;
• Managing ongoing relationships with different users who have different information needs;
• Managing multiple passwords; and
• Managing the user’s lifecycle.
ROUNDUP: 10 steps to easier access management
So in 2009 they embarked on an Identity and Access Management project.
Unlike most enterprises, though, UBC did this transparently. Anyone who wants can see the university’s original plan documents, including:
– Goals and Objectives
– Benefits
– Scope and Timeline (PDF)
– Program Overview (PDF)
– Impacts to UBC Departments (PDF)
As well as a number of helpful documents (“What is Identity and Access Management?,” “IAM and You – Milestone 1 End User’s Guide” (PDF), Frequently Asked Questions and a Glossary) for end users.
The project’s main Web page also has periodic status updates listed.
This is, in essence, an ongoing primer to an IAM project, useful to commercial enterprises as well as educational institutions and any other organization that needs to track people either as employees, clients, partners, suppliers or just about any other relationship.
If you need to get a handle on IAM and don’t know where to start, before forking out big bucks to attend some conference where someone will outline what they did in their IAM project, try this free resource and at least be familiar with the basic building blocks before you get too far into your project.
