Technology: Identity Management - ' Strategic Profile'

Strategic Profile: Mount Sinai NYU Health

Mount Sinai NYU health is a five-year-old health services organization comprising six hospitals and 17 affiliates on two main campuses. After an exhaustive analysis aided by Gartner Inc. And theBurton Group, the company chose Novell Directory Service (NDS) to power a digital identity directory service supporting a physician's portal.

CIO: Stuart Sugarman

Problem: Doctors were logging into a variety of critical systems, such as operating-room scheduling and patient profiles, requiring them to remember difficult user ID and password combinations. And they couldn't connect to those systems remotely.

Goal: MSNYU Health wanted to build a central directory service that would authenticate users for a broad range of activities, giving them the feel of a single sign-on for a variety of applications.

Strategy: Integrate all the remote and portal access identity management processes—from linking to the physicians' virtual private network to accessing portal applications—into a single system.

Challenges: Programmers had to use centralized programming methods, so getting them to code new applications to NDS's system was tough. And integration to a centralized health service Oracle database, which would allow more sophisticated identity management by centralizing a broad range of employee information, is yet to be done.

ROI: No formal ROI was calculated, but management readily signed off on the project because sign-on simplification was clearly so valuable.

Assessment: "I think of it as more of a user-driven requirement than an IT initiative that we just came up with on our own," says Sean Welsh, director of core engineering for Mount Sinai NYU Health.