Most higher ed institutions have spent years, and often millions of dollars, making sure their ERP holds an accurate, authoritative record of every person connected to the institution: students, faculty, staff, researchers, contractors, collaborators. That investment is built on a reasonable premise — better data leads to better decisions and a better experience.
In practice, that value often stops at the edge of the systems that touch the ERP directly. A new hire spends their first day locked out of tools their record already entitles them to. A collaborator keeps access to sensitive systems long after their engagement ends, because no one owns the connection between what the ERP knows and what the access systems do. A role change clears HR in a day and takes weeks to show up anywhere else.
None of that is a data problem. It’s an Identity and Access Management (IAM) problem, and it’s one we see treated as a technical function far more often than the strategic one it actually is.
IAM is the mechanism that turns what your ERP knows into something people actually experience, consistently, across every system and population. When it’s working, it’s invisible: people get access when they need it, and nothing about the institution feels disconnected. That invisibility is exactly why IAM is so hard to fund and so easy to underrepresent in planning next to the ERP it supports. The costs of getting it wrong don’t show up as one dramatic failure. They show up as normalized workarounds, quietly accumulating security gaps, and help desk tickets that are really governance failures in disguise.
We’ve written a new white paper, How Identity Puts ERP Data to Work, that lays out where this gap comes from, why it’s especially visible during ERP modernization, and what it takes to close it: governance that treats identity decisions as institutional decisions rather than IT decisions, investment that reflects how much of the institution IAM actually touches, and timing that treats ERP and IAM as connected rather than sequential.
If your institution is planning an ERP replacement, or has completed one recently, the paper includes a set of questions worth bringing back to campus, starting with: if your ERP were replaced tomorrow, would your IAM strategy support it, or would you be starting over?
No results found.
Tell us about your challenge, and we’ll work with you to design the right next step.