Person Registry
Develop a central system for the creation and management of identity attributes for UC Davis members Description:
There are several ways individuals can become associated with our University. Some are hired as staff, others join as faculty, and most are admitted as students. During their association with the University, it is not uncommon that they will take on new roles. Students may get hired as staff, staff may become students, former students often come back as graduates or faculty, and many more will remain 'friends of the University.'
There are specific computer systems on campus that are charged with maintaining specific types of information about people. For instance, the Student Information System (Banner) maintains information related to faculty and students while the Payroll Personnel System (PPS) keeps payroll information about staff and faculty, and the Accounts Management Database features information about anyone with a UC Davis computing account. Whenever information about an individual is stored in more than one location, it becomes necessary to identify that person in all systems so that information about them can be effectively maintained and retrieved. In the current campus model, each person's identity information is different depending on which system's records you are using.
As computing systems are used more and more for data storage, and our campus community becomes more dynamic, the task of matching the information and identity of an individual in one system with another becomes increasingly complex and error prone. If a match is not immediately possible, multiple identity records for the same individual can be created, ultimately resulting in malfunctioning computing services for this individual and support staff having to track down the problem and properly merge the identity records.
The Campus Person Registry will serve as a single point for the creation and management of an individual's identity attributes. Systems, like Banner or PPS, will interact with the Registry to request and create identity keys, referred to as a Universal Unique Identifier or UUID. Any time a person shows up in a system without a UUID, for instance a new student or employee, that system will present information about that person to the registry to retrieve an existing UUID if it exists. If this person is not already in the registry, a new identity record is created and a new UUID is issued. From that point forward all information about that individual stored in that system will be identified with the UUID, and can be easily matched with information in other systems via this UUID. In this way a unified view of a person can be maintained and information about that individual can be easily shared, exchanged, and updated between systems.
Notes/Status:Evaluation of options and development of proposed implementation approach under way. IT Strategies:
I.2; II.1 [see the IT Strategic Plan (PDF) for categories] Sponsor:
Information and Educational Technology