Are we atypical?
It’s essential for any organisation to manage access to their resources. Supplementary to this is identity management (IdM). By managing identities we can place accountability and entitlement upon an individual engendering a relationship of trust. At a meeting I recently attended the topic of ‘atypical users’ arose i.e. those out of the ordinary.
This immediately struck a chord with me as I’d guess, at this moment in time, they’d typically arise in Business and Community Engagement (BCE) related activities e.g. when undertaking collaborative research individuals from external organisations may require access to relevant resources/systems.
BCE is all about building relationships, exchanging knowledge and working collaboratively. Access and identity management are areas that really can help FE/HE to manage these areas more effectively. For example a lot of institutions provide access to learning resources via their Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) but most only allow access to students, if they were to extend their identity and access management policies and procedures to include other customers, they would be providing economies of scale and better value for money.
If you’re interested in this area I’d recommend the JISC Access Management blog and the blog ‘Just thoughts…’ by David Harrison, an expert in this area. As he puts it:
“The point I’m alluding to is that access and identity management is a missing piece in the jigsaw that enables future models of higher education to develop.” Read More…
A scoping study exploring the risks and benefits of extending access management to BCE found that the greater barriers are cultural and organisational rather than technical. These are to do with how institutions deal with BCE interactions through libraries and IT/IS functions. The study revealed that there is increasing demand for more standardised access for such users from both external (collaborative partners, work-based learners, SMEs) and internal sources, the latter because managing identity and access on the basis of numerous exceptions is not cost-effective or resource-efficient. In this context it’s also worth mentioning the JISC Collections Additional Authorised User Licences, negotiated to enable access to content for new user groups.
Feel free to give your point of view and/or share your stories via the comment box below.
Where, what, how, when, who?
Discussions at both the Advisory Services Away Day and the recent BCE Programme Start-Up meeting highlighted the variety of information sources and tools available to access BCE information across JISC. This post aims to summarise some of what is available relating specifically to BCE…