At most institutions, identity and access management gets treated the way any technical system does: a project with a start date, an end date, and a checklist in between. That framing isn’t wrong, exactly. It’s just incomplete, and it’s the reason so many IAM efforts end up carrying technical debt, competing for priority against everything else on IT’s list, and disconnected from the institutional goals they were meant to serve.
At this year’s EDUCAUSE Annual Conference, we’re bringing together leaders from institutions at different points in that journey, from early recognition of the problem, to progress that’s been paused or constrained, to programs in active implementation, for a session built around a different question: what does IAM look like when it’s treated as a strategic capability instead of a technology project?
Not Another IAM Project: Rethinking Identity as an Institutional CapabilityWednesday, September 30 | 10:45–11:30 AM MT | Mile High Ballroom 1CD, Lower LevelBreakout Session
Rather than a straight panel discussion, the session is built around structured comparison. We’ll walk through the decisions that come up again and again across institutions, governance and ownership, identity lifecycle and data stewardship, and alignment between IAM and enterprise systems like the ERP, and ask panelists from institutions including the J. Paul Getty Trust, Brown University, and the University at Buffalo to describe how their own institutions have handled them, where they diverged, and what they’d do differently. Attendees will have a chance to weigh in throughout, including a live look at where their own institution stands: IAM as a series of IT projects, or IAM as a program.
The goal isn’t to hand attendees a single model to replicate. Every institution’s history, culture, and constraints shape what its IAM program looks like. The goal is to give attendees a clearer set of questions to bring back to campus: who owns identity decisions at your institution, whether IAM has a real seat at the table when ERP or other enterprise planning happens, and what problems have quietly been accepted as permanent that governance could actually solve.
If you’re attending EDUCAUSE, we’d love to see you there. And if you can’t make the session, we’ve put the same thinking into a companion guide, IAM Governance: Best Practices, covering why IAM governance doesn’t fit neatly into existing governance structures, how to structure a steering group and subcommittees that actually move decisions forward, and a maturity rubric your institution can use to see where it stands today.
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