What is Identity Management?
"Digital identity is a psychological identity that prevails in the domains of cyberspace, and is defined as a set of data that uniquely describes a person or a thing (sometimes referred to as subject or entity) and contains information about the subject's relationships to other entities." — Wikipedia
"Identity management (IdM) describes the management of individual identities, their authentication, authorization, roles, and privileges/permissions within or across system and enterprise boundaries with the goal of increasing security and productivity while decreasing cost, downtime, and repetitive tasks." — Wikipedia
Identity at Rhodes
The Identity Management Working Group was formed by the Information Technology Steering Committee, and tasking with understanding the concept of identity at Rhodes.
A common understanding of identity within the University is essential to ensure that people are treated consistently by all sectors; that someone who is considered "staff" by one division is also considered "staff" by every other division.
Consistent, unambiguous definitions of identity also help the University address governance concerns: it helps us understand who has access to what resources, and why they need that access. In turn, a clear understanding of these entitlements helps shape license agreements and other contracts.
Finally, centralising a repository of identity information allows many existing processes to be automated. In the long term this will improve the turnaround time of many service divisions, and help them provide better support to the University in general.
To this end, the working group has already established a number of well understood identity categories and these categories are widely used within the University. Whilst a work in progress, the existence of commonly defined categories has already improved the exchange of information between various service divisions, and is providing the groundwork for future automation.
Identity in Higher Education
In a broader context, we exist in a world where identity federation is becoming increasingly common. Federated identity establishes the basis for a mutual trust relationship and thus aims to make inter-institutional cooperation easier. One early example of this is the adoption of eduroam in South Africa. However, to make federated identity work, we as a University need to align our understanding of identity with that of the South African (and worldwide) higher education and research sector.
Thus part of the problem of understanding identity at Rhodes is understanding how Rhodes fits into the larger higher education landscape.
