Identity and Access Management

Identity and Access Management is the central repository that reconciles and stores key attributes that define a person’s affiliation with UC Davis. The new system creates a unique record for each faculty, staff, student, and other campus affiliates and provides the campus with an authoritative source of identity data. IAM will help users, departments and system administrators keep track of and extract information (i.e., name, employee ID, address, work and personal phone numbers, department name, job title, etc.)

The Identity and Access Management project represents the first significant joint project between the main campus and the health system. The campus benefits from the IT and business expertise and collaboration of both organizations, with the vision and executive guidance of:

• Michael Allred, Associate Vice Chancellor and Finance/Controller,
• William McGowan, Chief Financial Officer, UCDHS,
• Michael Minear, Chief Information Officer, UCDHS and
• Peter M. Siegel, Vice Provost and Chief Information Officer.

A joint IAM system will allow the campuses to share information and resources including the cost of implementation. The project team solicits feedback and expertise from various schools, colleges and administrative departments.

Many departments will increase their productivity and efficiency by decreasing the need for staff to reconcile duplicate and erroneous electronic identity records. For example, Transportation and Parking Services (TAPS) will save 250+ hours of processing time on their data bases and roughly 60-80 hours of staff time per year. IAM also greatly reduces the costs for managing current and future applications and helps to eliminate duplicity of work among departments and staff.  

Many health system staff require access to multiple systems containing various patient medical records. It is common for some employees to have 15 or more different login credentials. IAM creates a single database for identity information and reconciles multiple identities into one per person regardless of the number of systems that person can access. IAM, combined with a new health system single-sign on application, provides health system staff with a dramatic reduction in the number of passwords they need to remember as well as the amount of time spent logging into various systems.

The project replaces many outdated technologies, often deployed within legacy applications. This modern technological foundation is critical for UC Davis; many new security and privacy rules call for increasingly sophisticated controls for technology access and audit trails.

UC Davis’s IAM integrates with national and emerging international identity federations to facilitate access to outside services, including: collaboration and research administration tools from federal agencies such as the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation; business efficiency tools such as UC’s Connexxus travel reservation system; and emerging research computing grid and cloud computing resources.

IAM mitigates the campus and health system’s exposure to increased privacy risks due to staff having multiple and conflicting access to personal information. IAM increases privacy protection of identities and other confidential data through the use of Role Manager, a tool that manages the level of access allowed to campus members. Role Manager keeps track of who has access to personal information, and if an employee leaves or changes duties, the system automatically removes or changes that person’s access for all systems in a timely manner. IAM functions as a central repository, diminishes privacy risks, and reduces the chance of multiple and conflicting access to information.

UC Davis relies on research and analysis of current and historical information snapshots and statistics of student, course, instructor and employment data to make strategic decisions for the campus. The data used to make such decisions needs to be accurate and easily accessible. Instead of gathering information from various identity sources like Banner, PPS and Active Directory and trying to reconcile discrepancies, the identity and access management system functions as the single source of information which will help ensure the data is definitive.