As I’m sure many of you have experienced in your professional travels, users are not always guaranteed to have a last name/surname/family name (see the list of Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names for other edge cases to consider!). In the way of an example, folks in India sometimes do not have a surname.
As IdentityNow requires identities to have both a first and a last name, how do you handle this case in your environment(s)? Do you just force a static value as their last name, which then flows down to other systems? Do you duplicate their firstname? Do you have HR “fix” this upstream by putting in some sort of placeholder value in the HR system?
This is a thought exercise for me at the moment as I build out my devRel tenant, but I have run into this a few times in the past. Curious to hear what others do!
This is a question that people assume that the data exists. There are so many scenarios where user data doesn’t match our expectations. I ran into a situation pre-ISC once where I had a couple of identities that had literally the word “Null” as their lastname which caused all sorts of problems.
I think if I was going to proactively address this, I think I would use a transform on both first and last name to put in something like “NO_PROVIDED_VALUE” if the authoritative source was blank. Then I would be able to provide the values appropriately for other systems. For, example, since AD doesn’t require first name, I could leave it blank but if another system required first name I could double up the last name or whatever logic would meet their needs.
