During his 2007 State of the University Address, UNL Chancellor Harvey Perlman spoke briefly about technology at UNL:
"We are fortunate to have a number of very skilled and dedicated individuals who manage our IT and they scramble valiantly to respond to the demands of the campus. With the introduction of any new technology, there is inevitably a period of discontinuity and experimentation, where the institution struggles to keep pace with the freelance curiosity and innovation of its faculty and staff."
Technology at UNL has evolved around the needs and requirements of our community and our departments. As a result of being generally grass-roots driven, we have all developed a wide range of systems and services that each strive to meet specific needs. In general, each of these systems or tools has its own system of managing users - and information associated with them. This means different logins, different passwords, and no way of one system talking to other systems around campus. The idea of “Identity Management” is to allow separate systems like My.UNL and MyRed to be certain that jdoe2 and 01234567 are actually the same person.
To function as a cohesive institution we need to be sure that our tools are cohesive too. We also have the responsibility to keep tight control over the keys to all of these resources. Connected services at UNL should be enabled or disabled for someone automatically - as soon as their status or their role changes.
Identity Management Steering Committee
The Identity Management Steering Committee oversees the policies and procedures surrounding Identities & Access Management. This includes the usernames & passwords issued to students/faculty/staff, authentication services, the account lifecycle processes, and approval of data access requests.
This group meets monthly and has representatives from Human Resources, Office of the Registrar, NCard Office, ITS Security, Office of Research.