IAM Foundations: Career Insights from UT Austin’s Marta Lang

To be honest, I fell into IAM. 

I was working at a well-known consulting firm after college; after eight years, I wanted to get out of the business of defending my weekends and personal time. A former partner from the same firm was working at UT Austin, loved it, and recruited me. The IAM team needed a project manager to come in to help create a roadmap and manage the resulting projects. 

So, I entered the IAM field at UT Austin as a project manager, where I was provided many opportunities to expand my IAM expertise and mature my leadership skills. With every project, I learned more about IAM — and not just the technical components! I firmly believe IAM has two parts — there are the technical bits, and then there is the IAM business. You must collaborate with your business partners closely, communicating clearly and walking forward together. 

Ultimately, I stepped into the largest role, the IAM team lead, nearly 5 years ago — in the midst of the pandemic and a new baby. The IAM business has become my passion and focus as I lead the IAM team into the future, one step at a time.   

I believe the biggest challenge will always be training and retaining resources. People who work in IAM have to be smart. The subject is complex and hard. In just a matter of years, those smart people grow their knowledge, skills, and they are that much more marketable. 

We know higher education salaries typically can’t compete with the private sector. Turnover, especially when there is a larger set of losses, means a shift in priorities. Projects can come to a halt as you focus on recruiting and cross-training the new hires. And that’s only if you get lucky to find the perfect resumes. 

It’s a never-ending cycle; as soon as you think everyone on the team is “green” (e.g., happy and staying put), someone’s light flips to “red,” and then, it’s just a matter of time.

Give yourself time to learn and grow in IAM. I think most people who start a new job eagerly try to embrace learning and knowing everything as quickly as possible. 

That is impossible in IAM. The acronym is short; however, identity and access management is anything but. There is no way that one can learn everything overnight or even in the more than 12 years I have been in the IAM space. I am still learning something new every week, and that’s one of the reasons I’ve stayed in IAM. 

Technology evolves; solutions change; we face new challenges. You’re constantly evolving your understanding of IAM. Be patient with yourself and everyone around you.

There are always going to be opportunities to improve user experience. You can offer more modern tools that are easier to use or to access. In reality, there are still a bunch of legacy applications that we all manage that barely pass muster. If we can deliver any enhancements, it’s a bonus. 

Then, there are the cloud and AI — the two new-ish bits of technology that are shaping how we move forward with IT changes everywhere. As institutions continue to navigate new technologies and adopt cloud-based infrastructure, IAM can enable success while supporting institutions with hybrid environments (on-prem and cloud). 

There are so many opportunities, but so many more challenges. Let’s consider ever-changing priorities, security concerns, decentralized IT, institutional politics, those pesky legacy technologies, or again, the turnover of people. The challenges we face are never-ending. Budgets are tight — maybe tighter because people want more. Even if IAM offers new solutions, is the rest of campus ready, willing, or resourced to adopt it? 

From my perspective, the key to facing these opportunities or challenges is to heavily invest in collaboration with your community, including executive leadership, IT leaders across campus, the Service Desk, the end users, other institutions, etc. If all of these stakeholders know that IAM needs support for change and improvement, that IAM wants to include them in the process, and that IAM needs them to help, then making the IAM changes becomes that much more logical and easier.  

Remember that any major IAM change has to be carefully calculated and communicated. Timing is essential, which means we only have brief windows. Collaboration makes those times that much easier and appreciated, which is such a shift from the alternative.