Session Abstract: Multinational fast food chain McDonald’s Corp. faced a sticky business challenge in 2021. Its 38,000 company- and franchise-operated restaurants rely on quickly onboarding new employees. However, due to synchronization challenges, these accounts were taking up to 24 hours to sync. This meant crew members could not access key resources on their first day. The increasing volume of authentication requests from diverse HR sources also led to unstable infrastructure. In short, the system needed a performance boost – and fast. Tackling this challenge led the Global Identity & Access team to rethink its sync processes and redesign its data refresh system to dramatically reduce the update times from a 12-hour batch process to a 10-minute delta. More importantly, it led them to reconsider how identity management problems are solved in a global enterprise. From the McDonald’s headquarters in Chicago to the day-to-day challenges of their restaurant owners, identity has a role to play in the experience of McDonald’s employees, franchisees, and customers. In this talk, we'll will discuss the team’s approach to solving performance issues. That includes how it uncovered the importance of working across different teams to make sure identity processes are designed to serve the direct needs of McDonald's operators.