Year: 2007

User-Centricity is a Philosophy, not a Solution

It has been a while since I posted, but not because there isn’t anything to talk about. In fact, there may be too much to talk about, especially since all the discussion about user-centricity in the enterprise generated so much food for thought. No, I have been deeply engaged in discussions on the future of

User-Centricity is NOT about User Self-Service

My previous post on User-Centricity in the Enterprise generated some interesting responses in the blogosphere (see here). One thing that surprised me was the discourse equating (or focusing) user-centricity with user self-service. The message seemed to be that user-centricity is absolutely needed in the enterprise because we need to provide users in the enterprise self-service

User-Centricity in the Enterprise

Recently, a few things have reminded me that we still don’t have a clear understanding of how the concept of user-centric identity will fit into the enterprise environments we are so familiar with. But the question keeps coming up, in different forms. Pamela Dingle recently commented on her blog about Patrick Harding’s observations on this

We need a strong Internet Identity Framework, NOW!

This is a little bit of a rant, but read this article in the New York Times and you may understand why. It is difficult to get past the feelings of disbelief, outrage and anger that the tragic story of Megan Meier will stir inside you. But if you somehow manage to move past it

Gartner sums up the CIO debate on identity

It feels good to come to any conference and hear people talk about concepts and trends that validate the direction we are taking. And the Gartner IAM Summit certainly did that. Steps that we are making in the areas of role management, identity services and the move towards tighter integration of identity into the fabric

OpenWorld 2007: Virtualization, Fusion and Social Applications

I’m writing this on a flight from San Francisco to Los Angeles, because an unfortunate scheduling conflict means that this year, Oracle OpenWorld and the Gartner Identity & Access Management Summit overlap for two days in the middle of the week. So I am going to miss the first day at Gartner because I just

The Disconnect between SOA and Identity Services

Here is what I learnt at the InfoWorld SOA Executive Forum, where (as I mentioned in my previous post) I was participating in a panel on “Identity: The Ultimate Solution to SOA Security“. The SOA community is not very clear about what we mean when we talk about Identity, let alone Identity Services. The panel

Getting the discussion going on Identity Services

Like I mentioned last week, this is an interesting time for Identity Services. In that post I talked about some of the reasons why this is relevant to what’s going on at Oracle. But this is also relevant to the industry at large. There are lots of small projects going on that at some point

The problem with Identity Services

This is an interesting time for me at Oracle. One of the reasons why I haven’t been active on this blog for a while is that I have been immersed in discussions about fusion architecture and how identity services fits into it. Those following my blog know that one of the initiatives I have been

Facebook and the Social Graph

Last week I commented on Dan Nye’s apparent lack of understanding about the need for a social graph for the web. This week, I read the following comment by Mark Zuckerberg, founder and chief executive of Facebook, on how he defines the social graph: “When we talk about the social graph we are talking about