Text: Marianne Fuglsang Welling Farsinsen, ITS Photo: AAU

- Previously, an employee in Digital Exam could, without approval, assign similar rights that he or she had to a colleague. We could see that many employees had access to all study boards, which we now realize was unnecessary. Now the rights have been streamlined, and each new access to a study board is approved at the study board, so users only have access to what they need, says ITS project manager Jonas Storgaard.

Unlike in the past, each Board of Studies now has its own approvers to keep track of who among them should have exam administrator rights. They have knowledge of their own context, and therefore it is an advantage that this is managed decentrally. AAU-IDM also supports rights management by giving the approvers a semi-annual overview of who has which access, which can then be 're-certified' by the approver simply clicking next to each name, whether the person concerned should retain the right or whether it should expire.

When AAU-IDM created an overview of the users in Digital Exam, it was clear that there were many errors in the data, and very old data that had not been updated. The errors were due to, for example, an employee being created with more than one employee number. Jonas Storgaard explains:

- For example, when a researcher came from abroad who did not have a Danish social security number, that person was created with a fictional social security number and assigned an employee number, but when they got their real social security number, they also got a new employee number, and no one deleted the first one. That way, over the years, the number of accounts created can really accelerate, and fortunately that problem is minimised now that Digital Exam is tied to AAU IDM, Jonas says and continues:

- It adds value to AAU that we maintain a strictness in terms of people only having access and rights in a system as long as it is relevant, and that we thereby ensure people who should not have it, do not have access. While the improvement here is very much about compliance, we are also taking a burden off the shoulders of the users when these processes are put in place. The withdrawal of the exam administrator right from a colleague, who is switching departments, is no longer the individual student secretary's responsibility; AAU-IDM handles that, Jonas concludes.