I recently had a rather interesting hallway conversation about the new approach to IdM that we are advocating. This was with a senior J2EE architect I work with whose opinion I greatly value. Paraphrasing the question that started the discussion, what he asked was this: Why do I, as an application architect, care about this?
One of the most common questions I encountered at the Catalyst conference this year was “what is application-centric IdM”. The second most common question (did not lose by a lot) was “how does this compete with user-centric identity”. It has taken a while, but I wanted to make an attempt at answering those questions in
Those who know me from the good old Thor days may remember the presentation I did at our last Advisory Council meeting before the acquisition. It was a slightly tongue-in-cheek piece on the future of IdM, in which one of the things I talked about was the growing desire to see physical and IT security
I received a very interesting observation from Mark MacAuley (http://identitystuff.blogspot.com) in response to my last post about role management. Another thought here – how does an organization engineer out laziness? In a former position I was doing implementations of (unnamed) product and inevitably when the topic of roles came up I saw just about everything
…we need to understand what user-centric identity is. That is the current state of discussion in the identity community. Many people are debating what user-centric identity is. Is it an architecture, is it a design philosophy, or is it a set of business agreements governing user interactions in certain systems? During the course of the
It has been quite a while since my last post. The period coming out of Catalyst is always busy, as it tends to generate a lot of good discussion that starts influencing the work we are doing. I have been neck deep in discussions over the future of our product offerings, so this has been
One area that I have been paying a lot of attention to recently is the scaldingly hot area of user-centric identity. No other area in identity management is generating as much interest in the community. While this is extremely gratifying (because the ultimate goal is to make our lives better and more secure, and who
Burton Group’s Catalyst Conference is one of the biggest technology events in North America, and is being held in San Francisco this week. If you care about Identity, it is one of the premier conferences to attend, because the conference usually fosters some really in-depth discussions into topics that are at the forefront of the
Phil Becker has written an interesting series of articles about the top 5 fallacies which appear and reappear in identity discussions, technologies and deployments. It makes for pretty interesting reading, so check it out at the Digital ID World Blogs. I wanted to comment on fallacy #3: Centralized Management Means Centralized Data. In his article,
In part 1 of this multi-post blog, I laid out what I believe are the various disciplines that make up a complete role management solution. In this post, I will tackle the more contentious discipline – that of role definition. Fundamentally, two camps have evolved around different approaches to the problem of defining roles. There