Article compiled by OIT staffers Tommy & Pery Doan.
The Office of Information Technology has embarked on an exciting multi-year, multi-project journey to modernize Identity and Access Management (IAM) services at SMU. One of the primary objectives is to replace our in-house developed Account Maintenance Automation (AMA) system, which since 2010 has managed most default services required by faculty, staff, students, and sponsored users. Replacing AMA will be a significant step toward increasing the maturity level of our IAM program. Doing so will involve implementing several new open-source applications that will replace AMA and introduce new features and capabilities.
During the second half of 2022, the IAM team successfully completed the first in a series of new implementation projects. This project involved laying the foundation for a new enterprise identity registry. The team successfully implemented PeopleSoft’s Affiliation Framework (AF). We also created a new bi-directional Web Service that enables AF to update the identity registry when employee, instructor, and student data changes occur in my.SMU.
What is Affiliation Framework?
Affiliation Framework (AF) is a tool provided by PeopleSoft that allows us to track an individual’s relationship with SMU over time. AF sets the foundation for an accurate, efficient, and supportable mechanism to understand the often complex history of relationships our users have with SMU. The illustration below depicts the specific AMA functionality that AF will replace.
OIT continues to work with its business partners on various other projects that improve data quality and timeliness in our systems of record, which is a crucial part of attaining accurate and timely provisioning of services.
The IAM dream team consists of two members of the OIT Infrastructure organization: Tommy Doan and Graeme Varga. Along with their many other responsibilities, Tommy and Graeme work diligently to set a vision for the future of IAM at SMU. In this initial project, they are working to operationalize our enterprise identity registry in the near future. Preetham Reddy is our incredible in-house PeopleSoft Web Services guru and was an integral part of the project. Pery Doan, PeopleSoft Applications Developer, led the AF implementation effort and coordinated testing with several of our amazing business testers in Admissions, Student Records, Student Life, Human Resources, and Payroll. OIT would like to thank Cruz Lopez, Cho Kim, David Bell, Priyanka Nigam, and Christina George for their testing support!
