The central information technology departments on the Davis and Sacramento campuses are collaborating on a more efficient way to maintain electronic identity records and control access to the university’s myriad information systems.

Today, departments keep, protect and reconcile their own electronic identity records. If all goes according to plan, the first departments to participate can start transferring some of this work to the new Identity and Access Management system in the spring.

Officials said Identity and Access Management, or IAM, will result in better, faster and safer handling of the electronic records that are required for such tasks as determining who is entitled to buy parking permits or see patient medical records.

The efficiency, officials said, will come from simplified recordkeeping and less database processing. A case study predicts, for example, that using IAM will save Transportation and Parking Services at least 250 hours of database processing time, plus 60 to 80 hours of staff work, each year.

IAM takes in the Davis and Sacramento campuses — and UC Davis may be unique among U.S. universities in including such a wide range of community members right from the start, said Vice Provost Pete Siegel, in charge of Information and Educational Technology.

“Our Identity and Access Management system will include records for most everyone who comes in contact with our campus — faculty, staff, students, physicians and medical staff, as well as other members of our community: health system patients, campus visitors, consultants and off-campus users from around the world of services online.”

The campus Technology Infrastructure Forum considers IAM to be the highest-priority technology project for UC Davis. The project has earned the backing of campus leadership and approval from several campus oversight groups.

The health system alone uses more than 400 software applications, said Mike Minear, chief information officer for the health system.

The average physician must deal with 15 to 30 passwords, and the average health system staff person has more than eight.

“The new technology will provide sophisticated tools to manage identities and reduce the number of passwords required,” he said. “It is imperative that the entire UC Davis community, including the health system, partner on this technology, to include all technology uses and to optimize resources.”

Identity and Access Management is the first major information technology project in which the central IT groups on the Davis campus and at the health system have teamed up to install and use common technology.

Both IT departments are funding the investment. Siegel and Minear said they hope IAM will be the first of many shared technology projects to focus on opportunities to gain value by sharing, installing and supporting technologies more cost effectively.

More information is available online, iam.ucdavis.edu, or from Gastón De Ferrari, project manager, gdeferrari@ucdavis.edu.

IAM PROJECT AT A GLANCE

• Establishes a single electronic identity record for each campus affiliate — on the Davis and Sacramento campuses — regardless of how many systems a person accesses.

• Frees departments from maintaining such records.

• Provides an accurate source of demographic information for campus statistics and analysis.

• Increases business efficiency; for example, by integrating with the Connexxus travel reservation system.

• Reduces the cost of adding electronic services.

• Enhances security and protects private information.

• Provides a modern foundation for complying with new rules that call for increasingly sophisticated controls for technology access and audit trails.

• Integrates with federal systems (National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, for example), and with research computing grids and cloud computing resources.