Higher Education Identity & Access Management (IAM) projects and initiatives deliver significant risk reduction, improved student & staff experience, and bring significant efficiency.

However, within the Higher Education industry, security leaders are challenged in articulating these key benefits to a diverse and complex set of stakeholders. These challenges include collecting relevant data (typically from Service Desks), mapping existing user journey’s and establishing change champions early.

Much of the technology and process changes only yield organisational value and ultimate benefit once staff, students and other stakeholders adopt the changes.  

The CAUDIT Top 10 themes rank IAM as number 7, given its criticality to securing the campus, whilst enabling broad digital initiatives such as secure adoption of cloud.

Identity-related attacks continue to rise, with the most recent Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report highlighting that over 80% of data breaches now involve compromised identity; therefore, there is a lot at stake getting these initiatives delivered successfully and to ensure continued investment.

What are some practical steps CISOs within Higher Education can take when designing IAM initiatives with significant outcomes, considering the business elements and which stakeholders are critical to success, while also focusing on engagement and change management?

• Identify key change champions early across your institution, by targeting those with specific pain points. Map out what the new staff or student experience will be to inspire your stakeholders to get onboard and support you and your project.
• Establish committees and forums with administrative, student, teaching and research stakeholders and engage them early. Many of the changes required to improve IAM processes, will touch on each stakeholder group and therefore getting support early is critical.
• Identify business case elements and sources of data, including the number of service desk requests that would be impacted through changes. In our experience IT service desks are processing anywhere between 50%-70% of requests relating to IT access, whether it be a password reset, or requests for access to new systems, much of this can be automated or streamlined.
• Define, measure and communicate IAM initiative business case metrics in a way that is relevant and connects with stakeholders and aligns with broad organisational strategies. This includes showing the difference between the current onboarding processes versus what it will be in the future.

If you are in the process of delivering an identity project and want to further explore practical tools and ideas for jumpstarting your IAM initiatives, get in touch with us.