Presentation: IAM & InCommon in Context

This presentation describes the role of Identity and Access Management (IAM), contrasts the unique needs for IAM in higher education with those for enterprise systems, and highlights the role that a federation like InCommon provides in fulfilling the these special needs. The goal of this presentation is to provide context for the presentations and materials that will follow during this kickoff workshop.

This presentation uses Prezi video, a tool that puts live video of the speaker (aka, me!) in the slides themselves. The link above includes only the slides; the light blue area would contain live video during a real-time presentation.

About My Role in InCommon

InCommon is the Identity and Access Management (IAM) Federation for the United States. Like other IAM Federations around the world, it works with higher education institutions, K-12 schools, and digital service providers (like conference software, online learning platforms, and operational tools like HR software, among others). Its role is to establish “trust networks”, a set of known and trusted organizations, that can share access to resources and services more easily in a digital setting by providing contractual assurances, software, and prescribed processes. This is a whole industry, so it is a bit more complicated than this simplified description, but hopefully the description is enough for the uninitiated to have a sense of this industry.

InCommon provides an intensive program, the Collaboration Success Program (CSP), to help those new to the Federation to discover, prototype, and plan the Federation services that they will use from the Federation, and the software they will integrate to leverage these services. This presentation is from the first day of the Kickoff Workshop for the 2021 cohort of this program.

I serve on the Steering Committee (Board) of InCommon, and serve as coordinator for one of the open source software tools, COmanage, that is promoted by InCommon for use by Federation participants.