James McGovern posted a very insightful list of contrasts between traditional enterprise IT culture and Web 2.0 possibilities.

As usual, James had a unique style of using photos on his blog. I’m not sure if traditional IT culture is best represented by the chimp at the top of his list or the bimbo at the bottom. 🙂

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Digital Identity,
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Phil Becker proposes in his ZDNet article that “Identity technology is today nearing critical mass on the enterprise security and manageability curve. Driven by increasing regulatory requirements, identity management has deployed in some form at most very large companies, and new technologies and methodologies are reducing the cost of such deployments enough that this technology is moving down market in a way that indicates critical mass is quite near indeed.”

However, “disrupting technologies don’t yet have identity technology they can reasonably leverage to release their value propositions beyond a sort of early demonstration phase.”

Phil then concludes, “we are nearing many tipping points in the next two years or less, where disruptive technologies combined with appropriate identity technologies will create real business model disruption in many industries very rapidly.”

I think this all means that something is about to explode!

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Digital Identity,
Identity Management

Dr. Miriam Lips posted an interesting discourse about the UK government’s Identity Management Policy and the UK Identity Cards Bill. She states that “To further facilitate this development the government will provide Identity Verification services for accredited organisations to check an individual’s identity, for instance when opening a bank account or registering with a GP.”

Does that mean Queen Elizabeth will become an official Identity Provider? She is a trustworthy soul.

Dr. Lips (gotta love that name!) provides an enlightening discussion about the historical progression of paper-based Identity, referencing “two models for citizenship attribution and the related issuing of passports to citizens, namely on the basis of ius soli (‘law of the soil’) and ius sanguinis (‘law of the blood’).” She proposes that the UK Identity Card is an example of “the newly developing model of citizenship attribution, the ‘law of informational identity‘.”

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Miriam Lips,
UK Identity Card

I just realized that I slipped silently past my first year anniversary of blogging and didn’t even realize it. It was on May 13, 2005, that I posted my first blog entry, discussing the Sun/Microsoft interoperability project. I’ve learned much in the last year about Identity and other stuff. Happy Anniversary to Discovering Identity! Thanks for stopping by for a quiet little celebration.

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Blog

Have you ever ordered online and then driven to the store to pick up your merchandise? It works nicely if you need something in a hurry.

Best Buy’s invitation to “Buy online – pick up in store” or similar offers from other vendors presents an interesting need for Identity synchronization.

When a customer order online, he or she will present digital credentials of some sort to place an order. To pick up an order at the store, that customer will probably present a drivers license or some other physical identification. Physical Identities and Digital Identities in this case need to be in sync.

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Digital Identity,
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Best Buy

I find it interesting that Best Buy is a sponsor of the Identity Mashup Conference organized by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School.

But I shouldn’t have been surprised. Best Buy is a “big dog” with a vested interest in Digital Identity – to reduce fraud, I presume, and create a better, more secure user experience for its customers.

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I’ve been trying to wrap my mind around the roles different institutions will play if User-Centric Identity takes off.

Will the Credit Bureaus (Equifax®, Experian® or TransUnionSM) become Identity providers? They kind of act in that role now:

1. A consumer wants to buy something on credit from a vendor, so he claims to be creditworthy.
2. The vendor doesn’t take the claim at face value, but requests validation from a credit bureau.
3. Based on evaluation of actions performed previously by that applicant, the credit bureau issues a credit score to the requesting vendor.
4. Based on the credit score, the vendor decides whether or not to extend credit to the consumer.

This interchange sounds much like the role proposed for Identity Providers in user-centric identity scenarios.

But now the questions:

1. Will online vendors be willing to pay a fee for each identity verification?
2. Will consumers be willing to pay a fee for these transactions?
3. Will consumers trust credit bureaus to deliver reliable information?
4. Will credit bureaus offer the service out of the goodness of their hearts?
5. Does anyone really care?

All joking aside – I believe the business relationships that do and will exist between consumers, vendors and identity providers are every bit as important as the underlying technology. But I hear people talking more about competitive protocol stacks than business plans.

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I had lunch with a customer today who has implemented Web Single Sign On using Sun’s Access Manager product. They are in process of migrating a wide range of business applications to the new infrastructure. He mentioned three benefits they had realized:

• Better user experience.
• Improved help desk performance.
• Lower operational costs.

Isn’t it great to hear when an enterprise receives honest-to-goodness, real world business value from technology investment?

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Sun Microsystems.
Access Manager

My colleague Sean O’Neil (aka Desmond) posted a great article about needing valid test data when you implement an Identity Management system. Good stuff.

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Sean O’Neil

Congratulations, Sara Gates and the Waveset team, for making Eric Norlin’s top ten list!

FYI – I joined Sun after the Waveset acquisition, so I’m not counted among the illustrious Waveset crew. But it has been a privilege to work with these great people.

Thanks to my colleague Vikram Kunchala for pointing me to Eric’s blog

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