In a growing organization, chaos often starts quietly. A new hire waits three days for access to a critical tool. A departing employee's account lingers in a third-party service for weeks. Two different systems list two different managers for the same engineer. These aren't just minor annoyances; they are symptoms of a deeper problem: a fragmented identity landscape with no single source of truth.
Without a central, authoritative record for your people and teams, you're exposing your organization to security risks, operational bottlenecks, and compliance headaches. The cost of inconsistent data is steep, but the solution is now more accessible than ever. It's time to move beyond manual spreadsheets and disconnected systems and establish a true organizational directory—one that is reliable, automated, and treated with the same rigor as your application code.
When your user identity data is scattered across HR systems, identity providers (IdPs), and individual applications, you create data silos. Each silo quickly develops its own version of "the truth," leading to significant business challenges.
The remedy for this chaos is to establish a Single Source of Truth (SSoT) for identity. An SSoT is a definitive, trusted repository for all user information, group memberships, and reporting structures. Changes are made in one place and then automatically propagated everywhere else.
While traditional IdPs can act as a partial SSoT, a truly modern approach takes this a step further by embracing the "as-code" philosophy. Enter Directory as Code.
Directory as Code means defining your entire organizational structure—users, teams, reporting hierarchies, and group permissions—in declarative configuration files or via a developer-friendly API. This configuration lives in a version control system like Git, just like your application's source code.
This approach transforms your org chart from a static, manually-managed artifact into a dynamic, automated, and auditable system.
directory.do is a platform built on the principle of Directory as Code. It provides a powerful user management API and agentic workflows to help you establish and maintain a single source of truth for your entire organization.
Instead of wrestling with UIs and manual syncs, you define your organization's state with simple, human-readable code.
For example, a user's complete profile, including their manager, direct reports, and group memberships, can be represented in a clear JSON structure:
{
"user": {
"id": "usr_1a2b3c4d5e6f7g8h",
"name": "Alice Johnson",
"email": "alice.j@example.com",
"title": "Director of Engineering",
"status": "active",
"manager": {
"id": "usr_9i8j7k6l5m4n3o2p",
"name": "Bob Williams"
},
"direct_reports": [
{
"id": "usr_a1b2c3d4e5f6g7h8",
"name": "Charlie Brown"
}
],
"groups": [
"engineering-leads",
"all-employees"
]
}
}
This isn't just data; it's an executable instruction. When this definition is updated, directory.do's agentic workflows get to work. These smart agents translate the change into actions across all your connected systems.
Because your organizational directory is now managed as code, you gain the powerful benefits of modern software development practices:
Stop letting manual processes and data fragmentation dictate your organization's security and efficiency. By establishing a single source of truth, you create a foundation for secure, scalable, and automated identity management.
The Directory as Code approach offers a clear path forward. It turns your organizational chart into a living, breathing system that is as reliable and auditable as your most critical infrastructure.
Ready to manage your organizational directory with the power and simplicity of code? Visit directory.do to explore our developer-first API and learn how our agentic workflows can build an unbreakable source of truth for your team.