Higher education may be home to the highest frequency of “qualifying events” in the IT and HR identity lifecycle: Individuals onboard, off-board, or change roles at a stepped-up pace compared to industry, making it all too easy for people records to be lost or duplicated when individuals change roles or return to academia after time away. The Identity and Access Management (IAM) program at Harvard University Information Technology (HUIT) has directly addressed this challenge with their new Find Person service offering, making it easier to match onboarding faculty, staff, students, and affiliates with University credentials they may have held in the past and moving the Harvard Community even closer to IAM’s goal of “one ID for life."
 
The new service went live in a stage environment August 13, and any Harvard unit that currently creates identities is invited to pilot integrating Find Person features into their applications. Work with Harvard’s next-generation Student Information Service (SIS) is already underway as that project moves forward toward its projected initial launch in Academic Year 2015-16.
 
Intended to benefit “people administrators” who regularly search for and create identities when onboarding new Harvard students, faculty, staff, and affiliates, Find Person makes searching for existing records easier and more accurate, as well as returning better information about potential matching records. Additionally, the service allows for automatic creation of new user identifiers if a match isn’t found.
 
While legacy ID-matching functionality allowed searching for existing users by “essential person info” last name, first name, and either the date of birth or the last four digits of a Social Security number, this stage release of Find Person also enables search for Harvard University ID (HUID) or universally unique identifier (UUID) value. Future releases will further extend these capabilities, including introducing fuzzy matching of names (i.e. returning a record for “John Harvard” when searching for “Jon Harvard”). Additionally, Find Person searches the entire main identity database – rather than just IDGen, as with prior functionality – revealing more potential matches and significantly decreasing the possibility of creating a duplicate record.
 
If a Find Person query returns more than one potential match, these are collated in an easy-to-use format to help people administrators choose the right individual and, if necessary, start the process of reconciling duplicate records. Results include, when available, values for first name, last name, official/listing name, date of birth, last four digits of the Social Security number, HUID, UUID, and the data source that returned each record. Future releases will also include gender, email address, role information, and a match-strength score.
 
If no potential duplicates are found, Find Person enables creation of a new unique identifier – HUID, UUID, or University Active Directory ID (ADID). Onboarding can then proceed as usual for a brand-new member of the Harvard Community.
 
Find Person is intended to not only reduce work burdens on people administrators, but also to make it easy for developers to integrate this expanded functionality. The service itself is implemented with a RESTful HTTP-based API, so that it can be easily integrated into applications and other services built in any language. Units that are interested in piloting the new Find Person functionality should contact Masha Shoykhet at masha_shoykhet@harvard.edu for more information.

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