Business case and funding proposal

This business case is the culmination of the efforts of a project team charged by the IT Commons to create a visionary architecture and plan for a future Enterprise Directory Services. Although the current directory environment provides valuable functionality such as white pages, email routing, some support of account provisioning, and basic identity management, it does this at a considerable cost and risk. We discovered that the current directory environment consists of much duplication of effort, manual account creation and maintenance, multiple instances of data interfaces between systems, locally administrated data stores to support account provisioning, duplication of identities, and no common process for de-provisioning accounts to prevent inappropriate access to services. The opportunity exists to create a more robust, scalable architecture that will not only support these basic functions, but will also greatly improve how schools, colleges, and business units provision current and future technology services.

The future architecture described in this Business Case is based on requirements gathered from across the University The future architecture we envision removes work from the current system and provides simplified processes and data flow. In addition, it improves the integrity of identity information and provides a more secure, manageable process for removing inappropriate access.

The future Enterprise Directory Services goes beyond a technical architecture. It includes policy and procedures, education and training, and service and assistance to units to leverage the technical architecture. The project team has developed a plan for funding and a governance model for engaging the campus community in decision making, taking advantage of the role of data stewards.

We recommend that the Executive Officers approve the funding to move this project forward to the next phase - implementation of the future Enterprise Directory Services.