Last week I was in Wisconsin attending the BrainStorm 16.0 conference where I had an epiphany:
Identity management was originally developed to help organizations either adhere to external compliance concerns, such as HIPAA or SOX, or internal governance concerns like process controls. The net result of these concerns was automating processes to force compliance. Technically speaking, automation then became a side effect of compliance.
In education, however, the initial concern was not governance, but rather the bulk management of massive environments. A school’s entrypoint to identity management had always started with automation.
At Brainstorm 16.0, I realized that schools are now more and more concerned with ensuring appropriate student/teacher access to systems and programs, which, ironically, is actually the old way of seeing identity management.