Thursday, February 16, 2012

The Importance of Aggregating Data

What do you do when integrating Identity Management with your enterprise and your company’s applications, and there are applications or services that require data that your identity vault does not contain? Often the solution is to put workflows into place to get the data that you need into your directory. When you go this route however, you’ve added man hours back into the provisioning process that cuts into the benefits you see from this kind of management service. As many of you have no doubt already determined, the best practice would be to already have this information in your vault, but where does it come from?

Most organizations use some kind of payroll or human capital management (HCM) software to keep track of human resources, salary, positions, and even information about your departments, facilities, and divisions with some solutions. Often when writing connectors/drivers only the information that is thought to be necessary at that time is aggregated and pulled into the IDM vault. However, in the future it is hard to tell what applications you will integrate or what those applications will need in order to provision or update identities. So when presented with a system like a payroll application, it is always in the best interest of your project to pull in all possible data. Even if you don’t have a reason to contain something like a “secondary state work license number”,  a field may need that value in the future and it’s always going to be easier to pull the information in when you’re developing a connector/driver the first time, then to come back later and extend its schema.

I hope you found this information helpful and that you keep this in mind the next time you’re looking at a connector/driver to a system that contains extra data. If you have questions about this, feel free to leave a comment below or contact us directly

Action Identity specializes in business solutions involving technologies such as Identity and Access Management solutions. We are more than a technology company. We provide our customers with the strategic thinking, architectural vision, investment control, and practical solutions that save money, return value to the lines of business, and holistically implement solutions to preserve operations typically impacted by change and modernization. To learn more about us, visit our website. If you’d like to speak with us directly, please click here

 

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