It has been awhile. Just returned from Digital ID World. Great discussions and enlightenment on my part. I have seen a few blog discussions about the Patrick Curry /
Kim Cameron session on user-centric identity in the enterprise.This is a great discussion and I believe that user-centric identity (as manifested in the user experience) is likely to arrive at the enterprise much like the Internet did – I am here, deal with it. I see an interesting contradiction in the drivers. The user’s want control of their information / identity. I have heard user’s voice their objection to a corporation mandating a federation with what they perceive as their personal information – classic example, 401K accounts. On the flip side, the motivation for the corporation is to provide federation as a means to reduce the cost of support, primarily in password resets for the many accounts – a significant cost. Allowing a user to be in the middle of, or decide, on a federation or passing of “identity” information allows the user to negate this corporate cost driver.
I suppose if we have an intersection of user-centric identity and corporate-mandated federation we might have a win-win compromise if most users choose to federate and those that chose otherwise are savvy enough to manage their own passwords and don’t call the help desk for a reset. Then every one would be happy – yea, right.
Actually I am optimistic that user-centric and enterprise federation will result in a better world, I just haven’t figured out all the details quite yet.
Mike
