Looking Forward to 2008

This is the time of year when everyone rolls out their start-of-the-year predictions. You can see a couple of those here and here. I especially loved Anshu Sharma’s take on this popular beginning-of-the-year routine. Predictions are risky business, especially in the slightly schizophrenic world of IdM. On the one hand, things tend to move way

Interesting News from the World of Identity

OpenID Busting OutThe news this week that Google, IBM and Verisign are looking to join the OpenID foundation could prove to be the last piece of the puzzle in the push to make OpenID mainstream. Reaction to the news has been overwhelmingly positive. But I am starting to get bothered by one thing. I recently

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