Rohm and Haas makes things stick. The glue that holds the first sheet of tissue paper to the roll, the stuff that keeps your candy bar wrapper snug on your chocolate, the chemicals in paint that keep it stuck to the wall.
There are good sticky things, and then there are the stickies stuck onto PC monitors with passwords jotted down.
The 17,000 employees at the specialty chemicals company—a company whose IT department is a firm believer in off-the-shelf software—until recently were laboring under the task of maintaining between 12 and 15 separate user names and passwords to access systems needed to do their jobs. The help desk, for its part, were handling 14,000 password-related calls per year.
To fix the problem, Rohm and Haas turned to IBM’s Tivoli Access Manager for Enterprise Single Sign-on a few months back. At this point, Rohm and Haas has pushed the application out to 700 desktops, with plans to push it out to the rest of employees in the works.
Tivoli Access Manager automatically manages numerous user names and passwords beneath the user’s radar. Whenever a user is prompted for user ID and password, the application intercepts the request, automatically entering the information. It does so by relying on a central LDAP directory that also stores passwords in conjunction with a local “vault” of passwords.
