Most discussions about Identity federation treat lightly the real business reasons for implementing federation while focusing primarily on technical issues. While the technology is vitally important, federation will not be widely adopted until business leaders gain a firm grasp of the real business justification for implementing federation technology and associated legal agreements. To that end, I recently prepared a presentation entitled, “Federation: A Critical Enabler for Dynamic Business,” focused on why service providers should implement Identity federation.

Let me share with you a list of what I consider to be the top nine reasons a service provider should leverge Identity federation to enable business value:

Identity Federation enables:

• Enhanced User experience – simplifes and enriches user experience through SSO, account linkage and service integration
• Privacy protection – prevents exchange of sensitive credentials and user attributes
• Service aggregation – enables access to multiple service partners
• Content delivery – enables delivery of content from multiple sources
• Advanced advertising – increases ad value through analytics of data from multiple sources
• Rapid time to market – enables rapid linkage to service and content sources
• Cost avoidance – enables service integration at lower cost than non-standard methods
• Leveraged business expansion – enables accelerated growth in delivery capacity and subscriber demand
• Foundation for future innovation – enables advanced automation

During the weeks ahead, I will address these topics in more detail. I welcome your input and critique.

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