Tag: featured

Finding your secret strengths

To grow your skills, you must know your skills. Problem is, that’s harder than it sounds, if only because we rarely carve time out of our hectic lives to do so. Might as well use these next few minutes to do so, and this post will give give a technique to help you along.

We cannot think about our skills in a vacuum. It’s a well researched fact that humans are horrible at assessing their own skills. We often inflate skills we do not have. We downplay skills we do have. Simply put, we lie to ourselves about the strength of our skills.

We need inner honesty. We need outside voices. We need feedback… in order to examine these skills we have and those we don’t.

Evaluating Skills

If you want feedback, it helps to have a bit of structure to shape the conversation. If you want to evaluate your own skills, it helps you to focus if you have a bit of structure as well. So what then should that structure be?

I offer up this very simple model.

Continue reading Finding your secret strengths

The Moments Ahead for Identity

[My address to the European Identity Conference 2016. Although this starts like my TCP/IP Moment talk it goes in a very different direction. In some regards, I think this might be the most important talk I have ever written and delivered.

Giving credit where credit is due – the ideas in this piece are the distillation of many many conversations over the years. I am deeply indebted to the following peers for their help, encouragement, ideas, and support: Allan Foster, Robin Wilton, Nat Sakimura, Josh Alexander, Chuck Mortimore, Joni Brennan, and Josh Nanberg.]

Remember when we used to pay for a TCP/IP stack? Remember when we paid for network stacks in general? Hell, we had to buy network cards that would work with the right stack.

But think about it… Paying for a network stack. Paying for TCP/IP. Paying for an implementation of a standard.

How quaint that sounds. How delightfully old school.

But that’s what we did!

And now? No one pays for a TCP/IP stack.

When network stacks became free networking jobs didn’t go away. I would posit that we have more networking engineers now than we’ve ever had before. Their jobs morphed with the times and changes in tech.

It’s mid-2016 and I think we need to admit as that the identity industry now looks a lot like the networking industry did at its TCP/IP moment. The standards are mature enough. The support for them is broad enough. And another thing, not taking a standards-based approach is antithetical to the goals of the modern enterprise.

Simply put, identity is having its TCP/IP moment. And this TCP/IP moment will spawn other moments in identity management.

I want to talk about three impactful moments ahead for our industry:

  1.  Standards-based identity
  2. Outcomes-based identity
  3. Professionalized identity

I want to talk about these moments and changes associated with them, but keep in mind that although great change is ahead, we need not be afraid of that change. Continue reading The Moments Ahead for Identity

Identity is having its TCP/IP moment

[This is my keynote from Cloud Identity Summit 2015. Unlike most of my talks, this one did not start with a few phrases and then an outline and then a speech and then a deck. This one dropped out of my noggin in basically one whole piece. I wrote this on a flight back home from London based on a conversation with a friend in the industry. Oh, there is no deck. I delivered this as a speech.]

[Credit where credit is due: Josh Alexander gave me the idea for the username and password as cigarettes and the sin tax. Last year, Nat Sakimura around 2 in the morning in my basement talked about service providers charging for username and passwords to cover externalities, and I completely forgot about the conversation. Furthermore, at the time, I didn’t fully track with his idea. I totally get it now and want to make sure I assign full and prior art credit to Nat – the smartest guy in identity, sent from the future to save us all.]

 

 

Remember when we used to pay for a TCP/IP stack. Remember when we paid for network stacks in general? Hell, we had to buy network cards that would work with the right stack.

But think about it… Paying for a network stack. Paying for TCP/IP. Paying for an implementation of a standard.

How quaint that sounds. How delightfully old school that sounds.

But it was. And we did.

And now? No one pays for a TCP/IP stack. Or at least no one pays for it directly. I suppose you can say that what you spend on an OS includes the cost of the network stack. It’s not a very good argument but I suppose you can make it.

When network stacks became free (or essentially cost free) networking jobs didn’t go away. I would posit that we have more networking engineers now than we’ve ever had before. Their jobs morphed with the times and changes in tech.

It’s mid-2015 and I think we need to admit as that the identity industry now looks a lot like the networking industry did back then. The standards are mature enough. The support for them is broad enough. Moreover, not taking a standards-based approach is antithetical to the goals of the modern enterprise.

Simply put, identity is having its TCP/IP moment.

Continue reading Identity is having its TCP/IP moment

Stop Treating Your Customers Like Your Employees

Unlike many of my other talks, this one didn’t start are a speech and didn’t start with a few phrases. This talk started as an analyst briefing deck. It had become clear that many of the identity industry analysts, if they covered customer identity at all, did so with a very narrow view of it. I put the progenitor of this deck together so show how broad customer identity is and, more importantly,  how amazingly large the opportunity ahead of us is.

Speaking  season came upon me and I needed something to talk about. I took out all of the Saleforce-specific bits and turned the briefing deck into the keynote below.

The gist is simple: customer identity presents the opportunity to grow the business and move identity professionals from being in a cost center to being in a revenue generation center. We, identity professionals, can be business enablers, something we have never been before.  But, and this is a big one, customer identity is larger than employee identity and applying enterprise-centric techniques to customer-centric use cases is a major mistake. What follows is my attempt to show big the world of customer identity really is.

Continue reading Stop Treating Your Customers Like Your Employees