College and university IT teams are struggling with technical limitations that make it difficult to comply with evolving preferred-name policies—at least in a timely or automated manner—across a more complex digital environment. While it may seem like a student name change is a relatively easy task for an IT department, at the most recent EDUCAUSE annual conference, multiple schools expressed questions, concerns, and challenges regarding their ability to deal with preferred name changes in directory systems and downstream applications.

Launching new IT initiatives is always a challenge, and the roll-out and adoption of a new identity and access management (IAM) program is no exception. While you understand how your IAM solution will better secure your organization and data and make getting work done easier, your co-workers don’t always look positively on change.

Earlier this week, we released the most popular blog posts in 2016 from our Enterprise Blog. So today, we wanted to do the same with our K12 and higher education blog posts. After all, we’ve covered a variety of identity and access management (IAM) topics this year on our Education blog, including unique IAM challenges in higher ed, managing contingent users, provisioning users with multiple roles, and student data rostering.

Previously in our two-part series on the identity and access challenges unique to higher education, we discussed users with multiple roles, the increasing use of technology in the classroom, and limited budget and manpower. As you may already have guessed, these challenges are just the beginning.

In today’s educational landscape, universities and colleges face distinct identity and access challenges unlike those encountered in retail and other commercial environments. And while retail, financial services, and the like are generally viewed as higher-risk from a cybersecurity point of view, the risks to higher education are just as critical. In fact, higher education “accounts for 17 percent of all reported data breaches, ranking second only to the medical industry,” according to Privacy Rights Clearing House. In this first post of our two-part series, we will take a look at some of these  challenges that are unique to higher education.

As the higher education landscape evolves, the community college system is growing in importance. For example, it is now commonplace for community college campuses, such as Houston Community College (HCC) and California Community College System, to serve as physical locations for associated state university classes. With this partnership in place, state universities can increase revenue and serve a broader student population, working to educate students who previously would not have been able to attend university classes.

Are you using an identity and access management (IAM) solution designed for the enterprise to manage user identities and access privileges at your community college or university? If so, then you’ve likely already run into some serious difficulties—and if you haven’t yet, it’s only a matter of time. An increasingly complex IT environment and growing number of users that require access to systems and data have made user identity and permissions management more challenging than ever, particularly in higher-education institutions.

At the end of June, I joined more than 16,000 ed tech leaders as they converged on Denver, Colorado for a week of idea sharing, collaboration, and networking at the 2016 ISTE Conference & Expo. 

*Disclaimer: This article originally appeared in the EDUCAUSE, The Inside Line, blog series. 

In higher education as in corporate America, we're witnessing a shift in employment strategies toward increased hiring of contingent workers—employees, either full-time or part-time, hired for one year or less, with a specific end date. A January 2014 report from the House Committee on Education and the Workforce called "The Just-In-Time Professor" states that 50% of university workers are now adjunct or nontenured faculty, a substantial increase from only 20% in 1970.