Most of our systems identify an employee by their work email address. It is what our single sign on passes across, so when each application was connected, the email address was the natural thing to match on. Expenses, the learning platform, the fleet booking system, the customer relationship system and the service desk tool all treat it as the person.
Last year one of our account managers married and changed her surname. HR updated her record, our identity system renamed her account, and her email address changed to the new surname, with the old address kept as an alias so her mail still arrived. All of that was correct.
The next morning six systems decided she was somebody new. Each one received a sign in from an address it had never seen, created a fresh profile and gave it default access. Her expense claims for the month sat on the old profile where nobody could approve them. Her training records showed her as untrained, and two weeks later the learning platform reported her to her manager for missing modules she had completed in the spring. The customer relationship system left her accounts assigned to nobody. It took my team nine days and eleven tickets to put her back together.
She was not unusual. About forty of our people change their name each year, through marriage, divorce or for other reasons, and every one of them had been through some version of that week. Most had simply put up with it.
An email address is a contact detail. It changes when a name changes, when a company rebrands, or when domains are merged after an acquisition. We had used it as an identity because it was always present and always unique, and forgot that it was never permanent.
Every system that supports it now matches on the identifier our identity provider issues to each account, which stays the same for as long as the person works here. For the four systems that cannot, a name change is a planned change. HR gives us a week's notice with the person's agreement, and we update each system before the address changes rather than after.
A key has to stay the same for as long as the thing it identifies. We had chosen one that changes whenever somebody's life does.
– Serguey Shinder
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