By Jenna Larson
OneIT has taken the lead on a project that improves door access throughout the University of Iowa. The improvements are more efficient and safer, officials say.
The Identity and Access Management Project started in response to the state Board of Regents’ TIER initiative to increase the operational efficiency of the UI, said Jordan O’Konek, who heads the Directory and Authentication Team in Information Technology Services and co-heads the Identity Management Project.“Greater efficiency realized through TIER allows the UI to focus its resources on its core mission of teaching, research, and service,” he said.
To achieve the goal, ITS has worked with Facilities Management and the Colleges of Law, Public Health, and Engineering to identify and define the door-access tasks that were consuming the greatest amount of staff effort, O’Konek said.
“For colleges with a large amount of electronic access to manage, such as engineering, this could translate to weeks’ worth of effort per semester,” he said. “We worked with our partners to define the business rules for granting access, our developers implemented that in code, and [Facilities Management] Key and Access Services made the changes needed to the access-control system to accommodate the automation.”
Regarding security, Facilities Management helped maintain and manage both mechanical and electronic locks, said Ann Rosenthal, the associate director of building services for the department.
“Although ITS looked at this project as a means to improve efficiency, [Facilities Management] looked at this project as a means to improve security,” she said.
Faculty, staff, and students must be authorized for door-access by the entity granting access, as well as UI police and Facilities Management Key and Access Services, Rosenthal said.
“The most significant improvement to security is that when status changes for faculty, staff members, or students such that they no longer meet the security rule, then their door access is removed for that set of doors governed by that rule,” she said.
University Housing & Dining worked closely with ITS as well as Facilities Management over the past two years to help lay the groundwork to automate entry doors to residence halls, said Brandon Mills, the IT director for the Division of Student Life.
“The security of our residence-hall students is very important to us, and this change allows us to more efficiently and effectively disallow people who are no longer students or living in a particular residence hall to gain access by using their Iowa ID,” he said.
This was an issue that needed to be resolved, Mills said.
“The work that was done to automate door access not only automated a process that was very labor-intensive in the past,” he said. “But allowed us to be more efficient in reallocating those resources that were responsible for the labor.”
The next step in this project is to define and publish a service definition for access-control automation to both advertise the service and formalize the process, O’Konek said.
“While the scope of this project is complete, we will continue to leverage this infrastructure to provide more automation in the future,” he said.
