If you're the leader of a department, office, program or other business unit, you and your chosen delegates have access to a new control panel in MIDAS: Organizations.
Find the Organizations dashboard at midas.odu.edu under the Management tab.
From this interface, you can manage MIDAS's understanding of your business unit and its members. By including people in the Organization, their accounts will remain active, and they will acquire permissions relevant to your unit. You can:
- import membership lists from Human Resources or Payroll data, or from instructor assignments.
- make individual memberships conditional on this data, or be notified if their data changes.
- review and audit memberships at any time.
The Organizations Dashboard
The dashboard for managing an Organization has 4 tabs:
- Potential Members
- Current Members
- Excluded Members
- Postponed for Later
The Potential Members tab is a powerful interface to populate the other 3 tabs. For this reason, let's review the other tabs first.
The Current Members tab shows a listing of persons who have been made a member of the Organization. You can add people manually, or use the Potential Members tab to add persons from that list.
The Excluded Members tab shows a listing of persons who have been specifically marked as non-members of the Organization. Exclusion may be useful for subdividing organizations, or to disregard incorrect data in systems of record.
The Postponed tab shows those items from the Potential Members list that have been set aside for later consideration. Postponement may be useful while clarification is sought about a person's affiliation.
Finally, the open-by-default Potential Members tab shows a listing of persons who match criteria consistent with being associated with your Organization, but are not in the Included, Excluded or Postponed tabs.
These criteria are evaluated for employment records and instructor assignments. For each person, the matching criteria are listed, and you can view additonal details.
From the detailed view, you can choose to include the person in the Organization, with the option to revoke this automatically if a currently-valid criterium no longer holds true.
You can also exclude a person from the Organization, or move the entry from the Potential tab to the Postponed tab.
First-time experience
On first visit to the Organization dashboard, the 'Potential Members' tab will contain a listing of every person MIDAS could locate who possess criteria consistent with being associated with your Organization.
As you review this listing, Inclusion, Exclusion, or Postponement actions will reduce the size of the list.
Subsequent management and review
New hires and new instructors will be visible in the 'Potential Members' tab, if data about them has reached Human Resources or Academic Affairs.
You can review and modify memberships and their notification and automation settings at any time.
In the Current Members and Excluded Members tabs, a warning will be seen alongside persons whose data has changed since their inclusion. If you previously elected to be notified of changes for that person, you will also receive a MIDAS notification and an email notification at the time the change is detected.
In an upcoming enhancement, a History tab will show all actions that occurred, including people who have been removed by the automation from the Current or Excluded tabs.
What happened to paper forms?
Historically, when a University employee needed access to a protected resource, the employee or their supervisor would fill out a paper form detailing their request. The most common types of computing accounts were listed on the form, but if those did not cover the request, there was a discoverability problem: the requester had to know what they were asking for ahead of time.
Most accounts required a signature of approval from the requester's Budget Unit Director, and some accounts required additional signatures from Data Owners or System Owners. It was expected that the form be submitted with all signatures already obtained, but the identity of required approvers was not always known to the requester.
We designed an online account request process to improve 4 key shortcomings of the paper process:
- Eliminate duplicative data entry, so that requesters do not have repeat data about themselves that's already on file.
- Improve discoverability of requestable permissions, by showing a palette of choices in each category.
- Automatically route requests to the correct approvers.
- Streamline the work of Account Managers, by having the system itself grant the approved access.
The online account request process was well-received and overtook the paper process in volume. But while the paper process was accommodative of data discrepancies, exceptions, overrides, and extenuating circumstances, the online process relied on data present in upstream systems of record: data about employees, supervisors, budget codes, systems and services, and permissions. Years of operational experience made us aware of artifacts in upstream data that hampered the fulfillment of some requests.
Existing processes inferred the University's organizational structure from records about jobs, budget codes and Budget Unit Directors, but in some cases, this was insufficient. We realized that an accurate and up-to-date digital model of the University's organization chart is necessary to further improve account and permission management.
We set out to enumerate every business unit and its leader, and then cross-reference it with its near-equivalents in HR data, academic departments, pre-existing MIDAS Groups, Web Directory pages and websites. Then, we delivered a MIDAS dashboard to empower the leader and their delegates to manage and audit their business unit's membership. This body of work is known as MIDAS Organizations.