Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
User Administration
It may seem like wheel reinvention to build an application for user
administration when so many vendor IAM products exist to provide this
capability out of the box.
Although we started off with similar misgivings, we quickly realised a few
things. As we said before, most vendor products are over-designed and tend
to cover a much larger set of functionality than your organisation is likely to
need. Their processes may not match what your organisation normally does.
They may use different (generic) terminology for similar concepts, which
could confuse users who are accustomed to the business-specific terms used
within the organisation. Aspects like workflow are definite overkill. In short,
all of this complexity in an off-the-shelf product requires specialised training,
and will continue to mystify newbies to the system in future too. Ironically,
these products could miss some specialised functionality that you
do
need.
We also found that a user administration module built using standard web
technology is an application of only moderate complexity that is well within
the capabilities of an in-house development team to put together fairly
quickly. When you use an agile framework like Grails or Roo, you simply
define domain objects (based on the data model we presented), and the
framework generates the persistence layer and the web interface for you.
Customisations to this, such as the two-phase request/authorise process,
will be the only real development required.
All this makes IAM User Administration a good candidate for a bespoke
application.
If you set out to build a User Administration module, these are the core
functions you will need:
User creation
:
You'll need to identify the organisations a user belongs to, the user type
(B2E, B2B, B2C, etc.), and a few other attributes.
Design this for delegated user administration, so it can be used by your own
organisation's administrators as well as by administrators of business
partners to manage their own B2B and B2B2C users. Your own
administrators get an organisation dropdown to let them choose the set of
