Here it is… week 10 of my new job at salesforce.com. Needless to say it has been a bit of a blur. Part of my gig here is to hit the speaking circuit. I was at the European Identity Conference a few weeks ago talking about killing off IAM and how it should be reborn, and next week I am off to the Identity Relationship Management Summit. I have to say, I am little nervous about speaking at IRM this year… not one, but two of my ex-bosses will be speaking there, not to mention my current one.

I have to admit when I first heard the noise surrounding Identity Relationship Management, I cringed, especially when people started referring to it as IRM. IRM sounds way too much like DRM to me and that just leads to bad things. Furthermore, my concerns with what Kantara and ForgeRock laid out was that it didn’t necessarily address relationship management; they presented the needs of modern IAM well but didn’t present the needs of relationship well. However, after many conversations and email threads, I still loathe the IRM name but have come around to the larger mission that Kantara has in mind. Simply put, relationship management is the future of identity and access management.

The Laws of Relationships (A Work In Progress)

Taking a page from the work that Kim did with “The Laws of Identity,” I wanted to provide the starting point for the community to build a similar set of design constraints and considerations for relationships and relationship management technologies. Our current IAM methods will be insufficient in a near future in which we are dealing with an unreasonable number of people and things and the relationships between them. At the IRM Summit, I’ll be presenting a strawman set of laws for relationships to help us think about this coming future. To that end, here is a preview of the laws (and axioms and attributes) of relationships. Continue reading The Laws of Relationships (A Work In Progress)