Engineering the Complexity: The State of the Art of Identity and Access Management through the Lens of a Case Study

Identity and access management (IAM) architectures address the problem of managing the life-cycle of identities and of controlling users´ daily operations and interactions with IT services in today´s organizations. The huge impact of IAM projects on the business processes and the heterogeneity and variety of environments where they take place raise the need to investigate how modern software tools and methodologies help facing the challenging problems of reality. The aim of this paper is to describe a case study related to an IAM project at an Italian university by focusing on the problems encountered and the adopted strategies and solutions.