Metadirectories aim for data consistency
Employee-centric data appears all over the IT landscape in most companies, from payroll systems and human resources to e-mail and network operating systems. Each application a user logs into stores his name and other attributes in its own internal directory. And users may be logged into a dozen or more applications within an organization.
When people leave a company, their user accounts should be updated on each system, but they often aren't. The names of former employees may be off the payroll system, but their accounts could very well linger in the e-mail system and other places until administrators finally update them.
Metadirectories can solve this problem by automatically coordinating changes to all application directories. Metadirectories may actually store a copy of some or all directory information, or they may act as a traffic cop, redirecting information requests to specific directory systems. In either case, metadirectories aim to provide data consistency across all directories and make the process of updating across directories faster and easier.
But metadirectories haven't taken off yet, for several reasons. Implementing them involves technical challenges, and their benefits may not be easy to explain to top management. Also, people in different groups often administer the existing application directories.
The technical part isn't difficult, says Jinx Walton, who, as director of computing services and systems development at the University of Pittsburgh, implemented a metadirectory. The hard part, she says, is getting the various groups involved to accept the concept of a central directory in the first place.
Yet another issue is awareness. "Metadirectories are a great concept," says Michael Hoch, a senior analyst at Aberdeen Group Inc. in Boston. But they have been slow to catch on, he says, "because directories themselves have been slow to be adopted." Organizations that haven't yet recognized the value of a directory can't be expected to seek a metadirectory. And many of the systems and applications that store common information don't even have formal directories; often,
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