Matt has experience integrating Oracle HR and SAP Successfactors with modern Identity Management Platforms but the principles below apply to any HR system.
There are many considerations when choosing to integrate a HR system with an Identity Management system. Much confusion can arise if it is not recognised that identically named attributes in the Person domain and the User Account domain may be used for very different things and therefore it is not always appropriate to simply allow HR information to flow to the User Identity platform. Examples of this:
- Name
- HR systems will typically maintain someone’s legal name - which may not be how they usually choose to be known as. Within the HR system a user might accept seeing their legal name, but may not want this flowing to the User Account Identity Source-Of-Truth which may have SSO relationships with multiple other systems. Therefore you may need to implement a “Known As” option in your HR system to enable users to specify the name they would like to use and have cascaded to systems across your organisation. There are also often technical integartion considerations which can stem from mononymous individuals
- Contact Details
- It should go without saying that contact details provided to HR should not be assumed to be acceptable to cascade into the public domain. There is huge benefit in Identity Management platforms knowing someone’s mobile number - facilitating 2FA for example - but it must be the correct number - and if a user hasn’t given permission for their personal mobile to be used in the company directory then this needs to be taken into account. The contra can be the case, where an organisatoin provides a corporate mobile, but the user is willing to give permission for their personal mobile to be used for company purposes because it is more convenient to them.
There are lots of opportunities for mistakes to be made with this integration. If you would like to integrate your HR and Identity Management platforms and benefit from Matt’s prior experience please contact him for a discussion.