AACII Meeting Notes

Thursday, November 15th, 2018

2:00 pm – 3:00pm

Doug Walsh, IS&T

Comprehensive People Database - A2P

IS&T is embarking on a database of all MIT people called A2P (Affiliate Appointment Processing).

The MIT Population consists of students, faculty, staff, researchers and affiliates without an appointment. The affiliate population 51% but there are limited processes and system capabilities to support them. Since they have no appointment, systems and processes are handled by DLCs on an exception basis.

About 24,000 of them have Kerberos accounts but this doesn’t include those who have ID cards but no Kerberos account (for example, building contractors). It takes a lot of effort to answer basic questions about them because there aren’t central systems with their basic information (i.e., location, department, role). We have to infer all that from department that first sponsored them. For example, issues have been surfaced by the Atlas Service Center which services people like spouses and alumni and retirees who need service but the Atlas Center staff doesn’t know where to look them up to verify who they are.

This proposal is meant to close the system gaps and reduce/eliminate guesswork around this population. Hopefully it will simplify and streamline what are now many disparate and different DLC processes and provide visibility to departments.

Project drivers:

• Compliance risk – does everyone get the training (i.e., sexual harassment or EHS) that employees get?
• Financial risk – a lot of software contracts are moving from Institute-wide where a bulk number of users is provided to vendors to individual named users.
• Data governance – Originally the Administrative Systems Steering Committee began talking about data governance issues, i.e., data being in different systems, hierarchies changing or breaking, needs for reporting. One data point that people rely on is headcount so the project started with that.

The first six months will dig into analysis – how do people get accounts, what data can we get at, what processes do DLCs follow and what data they capture. A definition of which people it would cover is still in analysis but a preliminary list is on page 4 of the attached slides. It might be too big an effort to capture absolutely all people who were ever affiliated with MIT including ODL students, minors enrolled in summer programs, executive education participants, contractors, consortium members, other program participants, research collaborators off campus. This project is a start.

Some DLCs have shadow systems that don’t connect to central systems for purposes such as onboarding so they don’t take advantage of central systems.

Once we have more defined categories we can grant entitlements by category rather than processing thousands of exceptions as we do now.

The timeline, steps, and costs being analyzed now. They wish to establish a steering committee to guide the team and champion change management and to identify subject matter experts to talk to.

Input needed from AACII:

• What are processes that DLCs follow in bringing on affiliates?
• What are their roles?
• What data is captured?
• What departmental processes will be impacted by capturing more data?
• Who can the project team speak with to get this information?

Start the process at the point at which we request an ID number. What data do we want to capture at that point? Set that up and they’ll be able to set up notifications based on when they got that ID number. We need to get enough information so that we don’t have to start from scratch if our systems change or their role changes or we need to do something with their info for some other reason.

If you have input about these issues that would be helpful, please contact Doug Walsh, douglasw@mit.edu.

Next Meeting:

Our next AACII meeting will be on December 6, 2018 in 4-105 and will feature;

Todd Holmes on the Travel Registry

Nate Nickerson (or his staff) on the MIT Homepage

Note Taker:  Andreea O’Connell