Old Dominion U Streamlines Identity Management with Business Process Automation
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Old Dominion University (ODU) in Norfolk,
VA, has implemented a workflow automation system to streamline the process of
approving user accounts for the institution's identity management system.
Manual Workflow
ODU uses its own identity management system, called MIDAS (Monarch
Identification and Authorization System), that provides faculty, staff and
students with a single username and password to access various network
resources. The system also allows people to request a new user account or
changes to their account (such as access to new resources), and to request a
password reset.
Before the IT department at ODU can create, delete or make changes to network
user accounts, the change must be approved — and depending on which network
resources the user needs to access, the request may require approvals from
multiple people.
The account approval process at ODU used to be a manual one. The change
request system was paper-based, and a form would traverse the
campus snail-mail system from person to person until it had all of the required
signatures. It would then return to the IT department, where the account
managers would create, delete or modify the account as requested. The procedure
was tedious and time-consuming, and the staff wanted to move it online.
The Search for Workflow Automation
In addition to automating the process through an online system, the IT
department wanted the ability to generate reports about the number of requests
going through the system, how much time they take to process, and so on, and
they wanted an easy-to-use graphical user interface (GUI) for non-technical
staff.
"We intended for the workflow system to be available to the whole university,
not just to those highly technical people in the Information Technology Services
department, and we were looking for something that would be intuitive to use,"
said Natalie Metzger, software engineer of middleware in the IT Services
department at ODU.
For the technical people in the IT department, Metzger also wanted a workflow
automation system that would be accessible by a REST (representational state
transfer) client, so she could communicate with the system on a computer
programming level rather than just through the GUI.
Metzger and her team researched potential solutions and whittled the list
down to three contenders: Bonita BPM
(business process management), jBPM and
Activiti BPM, and then they compared and
evaluated them on their ability to scale to ODU's requirements. "We finally
settled on Bonitasoft primarily because it had a functioning REST interface,
something that Activiti was just starting to develop at the time, so the
relative ease of design really made us choose Bonita in the end," said Metzger.
Implementation Process
While implementing Bonita BPM, Metzger was also developing the rights system
that operates in the background to define which systems a user is allowed to
access. "It was a huge undertaking that was a big part of our accounts request
process," said Metzger "It required a lot of database work, business logic
development, and it also needed to have information about who our approvers are.
We had to consolidate information from a lot of different systems so we could
have quick access to that data."
The implementation of Bonita BPM itself was not overly complicated, according
to Metzger, because the GUI is just drag-and-drop. However, the process of
integrating it with ODU's custom rights system was not as straightforward as
Metzger would have liked, mainly due to the lack of sufficient documentation.
"To integrate with our rights system, I have independent code that I just load
into the Bonita system so I can change it more easily, rather than implementing
it in the Bonita system itself." Despite the challenges she faced, Metzger noted
that the documentation of Bonita BPM has improved significantly in the couple
of years since she implemented the system.
Results
Bonita BPM has streamlined ODU's user account approval process by bringing it
into the digital age. Users requesting accounts, changes to accounts or password
retrievals don't see the Bonita interface; they see only the MIDAS identity
management interface, which uses a wizard to guide them through the process of
account requests, including asking them what type of account they need, who they
work for and who their supervisor is. Once the user submits a request, MIDAS
communicates with Bonita BPM in the background, and then Bonita determines who
needs to approve the request, sends the task to them and those people receive an
e-mail notification. The approvers can then log on to MIDAS to approve or deny
the request.
The implementation of Bonita BPM has reduced the turnaround time for account
requests from three days to one, on average. "It's not the creating the account
that takes so long; it's getting all of the approvals," said Metzger. "Before,
they would send the pieces of paper across campus, wait for a signature, wait
till it comes back to us, and then create the account. Now it's just online
where somebody clicks the button and says 'yes, I do approve' or 'no, I don't.'"
About the Author
Leila Meyer is a technology writer based in British Columbia. She can be reached at [email protected].