University of California, Merced

Project Overview:

UC Merced hopes to utilize the TIER Campus Success Program to accelerate our adoption of a permanent, robust, IAM solution that can scale and grow with the campus. As UC Merced matures from a start-up campus to an established research institution facing significant growth in an environment of constrained resources, investing in technologies to better manage the identity and lifecycle of our students and employees has become a critical consideration.

UC Merced utilizes a home-grown person registry that we are eager to replace with midPoint in the name of scalability, ease of administration, and supportability. Stabilizing this foundational component of UC Merced’s IAM environment will allow focus to shift toward user-facing enhancements, such as adopting Grouper to achieve a long-desired group and role management platform.

UC Merced is aggressively pursuing a cloud first strategy and moved our Shibboleth service to the hosted service provided by Unicon in 2016. Migrating that environment to the TIER containerized release is a natural evolution of our IAM and cloud strategies. 

Key Area(s) of Interest: 

• Shibboleth IdP and SP
• Grouper Access Management Software
• midPoint Entity Registry

Organization Summary: 

UC Merced opened Sept. 5, 2005, as the newest campus in the University of California system and the first American research university of the 21st century. Situated in California’s Central Valley, the campus significantly expands access to the UC system for students throughout the state, with a special mission to increase college-going rates among students in the San Joaquin Valley. Nearly 70% of UC Merced’s student body are first-generation students, thus, enabling university access is a core mission.  UC Merced also serves as a major catalyst for advanced research, a model of sustainable design and construction, and a stimulus to economic growth and diversification throughout the region.

UC Merced is undergoing a significant expansion. The $1.3B Merced 2020 Project will double the size of the existing campus over the next three years, delivering the infrastructure and instructional space necessary to support 10,000 students. The Office of Information Technology is preparing to support this additional population by aggressively pursuing the implementation of robust yet streamlined enterprise systems that can scale with anticipated need.

The Office of Information Technology launched an IT workforce plan in January 2015 with the goal of right-sizing the IT organization to meet the growing campus needs. In addition to recruiting new staff skills, an operational leadership structure has been designed and added capacity on the areas of academic technology and cyberinfrastructure. Formalized ITIL processes and IT governance have become the norm, along with performance management, and professional development. As a result, despite OIT’s 30% turnover, it now delivers more value to campus as measured by number of projects successfully delivered, service ticket response time, and budget savings.

As of Fall 2017, UC Merced serves a community of approximately 7,900 undergraduate and graduate students, and 3,036 faculty and staff. This includes of 250 ladder-rank faculty, 40 of whom are new faculty hires as of Aug 2017.

Contact Information:

Campus Success Blogs Published:

• Modernizing Systems, Processes, and Identities at UC Merced - Nick Dugan, University of California, Merced