Embodiments of the invention relate generally to matching different user representations of a person, and, specifically, to matching different user representations of a person in a plurality of computer systems.
Typically, legal custodians are represented in computer systems using system account Identifiers (IDs) and other identifiers that vary. For example, John Doe might be known by a human resource system with personnel ID 12345, whereas on department file servers, his ID may be “jdoe”, and, in the email system, he may be known as john.doe@example.com, and so forth. If a custodian, for example, owns or has access to data that is responsive to a legal case, then this data may have to be put on legal hold. It may be crucial to identify all data that a particular custodian owns or had/has access to, irrespective of the computer system or application system this data is stored in, or by which identifier or alias the custodian is known on a specific system.
This is further complicated as custodians may have changed their work location, organizational unit, name or user ID and so on in the past. A single custodian may have many IDs for the various systems the custodian works with or is managed through, sometimes even multiple IDs for the same system may exist. Further complications are operational IDs that a custodian may have access to. Additional complication may exist through custodians with the same name, but differences in other attributes, such as an organizational unit or a previous name (e.g., maiden name).
Organizations may be faced with the question of whether a certain person or custodian may have accessed data via a computer system or application without having the opportunity to ask the person or to find out the truth.