Many institutions treat IAM the way they treat any technology project: scope it, staff it, ship it, move on. It’s an understandable approach, but it’s shortsighted. IAM touches every user and every service at an institution—the impact is enormous whether it’s intentional or not. The question is whether your institution is shaping that impact deliberately, with the governance, strategic voice, and campus engagement it deserves, or whether it’s just happening. Teams that focus on IAM need the skills and the organizational support to align technology decisions with business goals, security, user experience, and institutional efficiency. Approaching IAM as a series of IT projects makes that alignment nearly impossible.
A programmatic approach to identity not only recognizes, but starts to take on those ever-present elephants in the room. The access that’s obviously wrong but nobody’s fixed. The population of users (researchers, contractors, affiliates) that isn’t addressed by existing process and generates the same manual work over and over. The audit finding that turns out to be a symptom of a decision from twenty years ago. Campus already knows about most of these. Students and faculty feel them as friction. Staff work around them. IT fields the tickets. But these are long-term, systemic problems, and they aren’t fixed by a finite project. They require sustained engagement, the right people at the table, and an institutional commitment to keep working on them even when something more urgent is competing for attention. That’s exactly why IAM needs a strategic program behind it, not just a series of initiatives.
At EDUCAUSE this year, we brought three institutions on stage who are living different versions of that story. The University at Buffalo is early in the work, building governance structures and trying to get the right people to recognize they’re stakeholders. Brown University has a system that technically functions but has become so customized over time that unwinding it is its own project, and the team has had to rediscover its own identity as a service provider in the process. The Getty is in active implementation, replacing its IAM platform at the same time it’s navigating an ERP replacement, making real decisions in real time about what goes where and why.
The conversations that came out weren’t about technology. They were about who owns identity decisions, what happens when nobody does, and what it takes to get HR, legal, or research administration to recognize they have a stake in identity governance, not just in their own systems but in the institutional layer that connects everything.
The questions worth bringing back to campus are uncomfortable in the best way. Who actually owns identity decisions at your institution? Does IAM have a seat at the table when enterprise planning happens, or does it get handed requirements after the decisions are made? What problems has your institution quietly accepted as permanent that a real governance conversation could surface and solve?
We think that a healthy approach to IAM Governance is vital to impactful, long-term IAM. Please download the attached IAM Governance best-practices guide and see how it applies to your own situation. If you have more questions, ideas, or feedback, we’d love to hear from you!
About Moran
For over two decades Moran has focused on the most pressing technology needs of the institutions of higher education and research that we’ve served. We partner with institutions to achieve improvements in student experience and success, digital transformation, administrative optimization, and risk management. For more information about Moran or to schedule a conversation please click here.
No results found.
Tell us about your challenge, and we’ll work with you to design the right next step.