According to a Sun press release, American Express has chosen Sun’s Java Enterprise System (JES) platform to provide a new integrated software environment for critical applications, including Identity Management.

“We found an excellent value proposition in the Java Enterprise System as it will help us to consolidate our licensing costs, reduce integration costs, and improve both functionality and flexibility of our distributed applications, identity management and web services,” said Phil Steitz, chief technology officer, American Express.

Tags: Identity
Digital Identity
Identity Management
Sun Microsystems
JES
American Express

Cipher: “Zero. One that has no weight, worth, or influence. Non-entity. “

The story about a dead man riding the subway for hours before anyone realized he was dead reminds me of an old story, Cipher in the Snow, about a young kid who had been told he was nothing so many times, by so many people, that he grew to believe them. When he stumbled off the school bus to collapse and die in a snowbank, nobody really cared.

How tragic it is that any of us would dismiss another human being as worthless or good for nothing. How sad that any person would have to go through life thinking that he or she was a zero.

When we all realize that every human being is of infinite worth, that every human Identity is eternal, we would all be more civil with each other.

Tags: Identity
Eternal Identity

An informative white paper (.pdf file) from Cybertrust describes the implementation of a national ID card for the Republic of Estonia: “Issued by the Estonian Government’s citizen and migration board (CMB), national ID cards represent the primary source of personal identification for people living within Estonia and are mandatory for all citizens and resident aliens above the age of fifteen.”

Tags: Identity
Digital Identity
Identity Management
National ID Card
Estonia
Cybertrust

While attending a business luncheon sponsored by the Arizona Management Society today, I was reminded that Identity Management is not yet a household term. Several people I met, ranging from a sales executive with a large telecom equipment manufacturer to an owner of a small business that makes swim suits for scuba divers looked at me quizzically and said, “What is Identity Management?”

When I explained the concept in terms of User IDs and passwords, they either understood a little bit or politely played like they did.

It is easy to become so immersed in a particular topic that we can begin to imagine that our daily work is much more pervasive than it actually is. I’m sure that Dinah Lundell, who made scuba diver swim suits, thinks her work is a whole lot more important than Identity Management. For her, it probably is.

Tags: Identity
Digital Identity
Identity Management
NoLogo
scuba
Arizona Management Society

This makes me imagine that my previous post on bovine identity was many years too late …

… and that the Burton Group‘s choice of name for an Identity Conference was not as original as once supposed.

Tags: Identity
Digital Identity
Identity Management
Cows
Burton Group
Catalyst Conference

I also posted this on Doc Searl’s IT Garage, in response to his comments about Dave Kearn’s piece on DRM and its potential applicability to user-centric Identity.

May I suggest two terms that seem to fit the current dicussion about how Digital Rights Management may fit with User-Centric Identity? It seems that the discussion is focused on “Identity Rights Management” or “Digital Identity Rights Management.” The question is who has rights to own, control or use an individual’s Digital Identity or attributes of one’s identity.

User-centric identity proponents may argue that Identity Rights belong exclusively to individuals, and that any institution’s use of a Digital Identity should be limited to cases where an individual gives explicit permission for its use.

At the other extreme, Customer Relationship Management advocates may argue that any attribute of an individual’s Digital Identity in the enterprise’s possession can be used however the enterprise see’s fit.

Tags: Identity
Digital Identity
Identity Management
Digital Rights Management
Identity Rights Management
User Centric Identity

It will be interesting to see how big a role the biometrics powerhouse created from the Viisage and Identix merger will play in meeting the requirements arising out of the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC) guidance “on the risks and risk management controls necessary to authenticate the identity of customers accessing Internet-based financial services” published last October.

Any commercial or government enterprise providing “Internet-based financial services” must be evaluating what strong authentication services are appropriate to mitigate risk within the FFIEC guidelines. Biometric authentication mechanisms provided by Viisage/Identix will certain be part of that mix.

Tags: Identity
Digital Identity
Identity Management
Biometrics
FFIEC
Viisage
Identix

Last September, I wrote about the Identity Grid and suggested some updates I thought appropriate. Here is a brand spanking new version from the Identity braintrust at Sun Microsystems!

Not all my suggestions were incorporated, but some I didn’t think of were. I think this is a good framework for discussing Identity Management functionality. I shall reference this in some upcoming posts.

Tags: Identity
Digital Identity
Identity Management
Sun Microsystems
Identity Grid

Thanks to Eric Norlin for pointing out a thought-provoking article by David Talbot, who reports about David Clark of MIT proposing to “rethink the Internet’s basic architecture, to potentially start over with a fresh design” to cope with issues like “lack of built-in security.”

Talbot states, ” … for the average user, the Internet these days all too often resembles New York’s Times Square in the 1980s. It was exciting and vibrant, but you made sure to keep your head down, lest you be offered drugs, robbed, or harangued by the insane. Times Square has been cleaned up, but the Internet keeps getting worse, both at the user’s level, and — in the view of Clark and others — deep within its architecture.”

Whether a complete re-think or less agressive add-on fix is needed, I think the graphic representation of Clark’s “four goals for a new Internet architecture” aptly summarizes the key issues which must be addressed. It appears that Identity Management would be a key enabler for reaching these goals.

Tags: Identity
Digital Identity
Identity Management
Internet
DavidClark
InformationSecurity

Thanks to Radovan Semancik for summarizing strengths and weaknesses of several Identity systems from the “Internet-scale SSO” perspective.

His conclusion: “I really think that we must see at least one more generation of these systems to get it really right.”

Tags: Identity
Digital Identity
Identity Management
SSO