Posted April 12th, 2010
I’ve been a bit quiet on Tuesdaynight lately… sorry – it has been a bit crazy around here lately.
At any rate, we are 7 days away from Burton Group Catalyst EU! In the 7+ years that I’ve been involved in one way shape or form with Burton Group, I’ve never been to a Catalyst EU – so I am very excited. For those of you joining us, you are in for a treat – John Seely Brown will delivering the keynote for us. Besides Mr. Brown, the IdPS team has got some great content waiting for you:
- Bob will kick things off with a look to the future identity architecture
- I’ll be talking about the IdM market as a whole
- Lori and I will have a serious conversation with our dear friend – provisioning
Fun for the whole family…
For those of you not heading to Prague, follow the conversation on Twitter. We’ll be using the #cat10 for the conference and the identity conversation will be on #idps.
See you there either in person or virtually…
Posted November 17th, 2009
A friend in the industry recently asked me for my thoughts on OpenID, InfoCards, and the US federal government’s work to consume non-government issued credentials. Letting the question rattle around in my head for a while, here’s what I’ve got so far.
My hope is that the overall ICAM initiative is successful—not because I have been eagerly waiting to interact with the federal government using some form of authenticated credential—but because we (citizens, enterprises and government) are at a pivotal moment in the history of the web. With the US government working with both the OpenID and InfoCard Foundations, there exists an opportunity to change how individuals interact with large organizations, both public and private. For the first time, individuals would be able to (even encouraged to) interact with a large organization (such as the US federal government) using an identity asserted, not by the large organization, but by the individual. In this case, the State is no longer the sole provider of identity. This breaks the monopoly that the State has had on credentials and is indicative of the future to come.
But there is a long road to walk before getting there. There are numerous concerns with these plans. Among these are notable security concerns, especially with OpenID, that the identity community is not blind to. These are not my primary concerns. Continue reading "Hopes and concerns for identity"...
Posted June 29th, 2009
Last week I was at the recent Department of Homeland Security’s Government 2.0 Privacy and Best Practices conference. Not surprisingly the subject of transparency came up again and again. One thing that definitely caught my attention was a comment by one of the panelists that efforts towards government transparency are too often focused on data transparency rather than process transparency. While we have Data.gov as one of the current administration’s steps towards furthering government transparency, we do not have an analogous Process.gov. Said another way – we get the sausage but don’t get to see how it is made. This isn’t transparent government but translucent government.
From what I’ve seen I’d say that enterprises have achieved the opposite kind of translucency with their identity management programs. Though enterprises have achieved some degree of process transparency by suffering through the pains of documenting, engineering, and re-engineering process, they haven’t been able to achieve data transparency. Identity information has yet to become readily available throughout the enterprise in ways that the business can take advantage of. Identity information (such as entitlements) has yet to achieve enterprise master-data status. Worse yet, the quality of identity data still lags behind the quality of identity-related processes in the enterprise.
For those of you attending the Advanced Role Management workshop at Catalyst this year, you’ll hear me and Kevin present the findings from our recent roles research. Throughout our interviews we heard identity teams discuss their struggles with data management and data quality. Finding authoritative sources of information, relying on self-certified entitlement information, and decoding arcane resource codes were just some of the struggles we heard. No one said that identity data transparency was easy, but without it enterprises can only achieve identity translucency and not true transparency. Continue reading "Transparent or Translucent?"...
Posted May 13th, 2009
Ian Yip’s take on access management versus entitlement management can be partially summed up with this equation:
Entitlement management is simply fine-grained authorisation + XACML
I have four problems with this.
First, definitions that include a protocol are worrisome as they can overly restrict the definition. For example, if I defined federation as authentication via SAML, people would quickly point out that authentication via WS-Fed was just as viable as a definition. So in terms of an industry conversation, we need to make sure that our terms are not too narrow.
Second, I fear that this definition is a reflection of products in the market today and not a statement on what “entitlement management” is meant to do. Yes, most of today’s products can use XACML. Yes, they facilitate authorization decisions based on a wider context. But who’s to say that these products, and the market as a whole, have reached their final state? Along these lines, I wonder if externalized authorization stores are a required part of an “entitlement management” solution?
Third, there is something missing from the definition – the policy enforcement point. A fine-grained authorization engine provides a policy decision point, but that still leaves the need for an enforcement point. This holds true whether an application has externalized its authorization decisions or not. Continue reading "Nailing Down the Definition of “Entitlement Management”"...
Posted March 6th, 2009
Being the new-ish addition to the IdPS team is, well, an interesting place to be. Besides the requisite induction activities (ask me at Catalyst how you pick up the dry cleaning for a team who lives all across the country), I’ve been working with my peers on vastly different pieces of research. And being curious by nature, I’m loving the chance to not only dig into different topics, but also observe how different people go about the actual process of analyzing a topic or a market. One technique that Burton Group uses is Contextual Research (CR). Essentially, the CR process is meant to challenge an analyst’s knowledge of a subject and their associated preconceived notions as to what problems enterprises face and how they are facing them. It turns seasoned veterans, experts in the field, into beginners again. This is what practitioners of Zen Buddhism call “beginner’s mind.”
Here’s how it works in a nutshell. Kevin (seasoned vet) and Ian (newbie) identify a bunch of organizations to talk to. So far nothing out of the ordinary as compared to our other approaches to research. That being said, the conversations we have with these organizations is very different from typical research techniques. Instead of coming to the conversation with a fixed hypothesis that we want to prove out, we come to the conversation with nothing. No leading questions. No surveys. No preconceptions. Continue reading "Zen Mind, Newb Mind"...
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