Glossary
Identity Reconciliation
Identity reconciliation merges or matches identity records from two systems being brought together — during a company merger, a platform migration, a consolidation of previously separate tools — so that the same real person, previously represented as two separate identities in two separate systems, ends up as one coherent identity afterward rather than two, or worse, silently combined in an unintended way that grants access neither original system meant for them to have.
The failure modes run in both directions and are equally real: two people who happen to share enough attributes get incorrectly merged into one identity, combining access that was never meant to belong to a single person; or one person's two legitimate identities are treated as unrelated and left permanently duplicated, leaving stale, forgotten access active in whichever system nobody remembered to clean up. Getting this right requires treating the reconciliation itself as a deliberate project with real verification, not an incidental side effect of whatever migration tooling happens to be doing the data transfer.