15 March 2006 - 14:24Reputation as the New Currency
Dave Kearns, that wacky revolutionary (NOT) over at NetworkWorld in his latest article found little but Dick Hardt's speech at the O'Reilly-run Emerging Technology Conference. Dick's the CEO of Sxip Technology and proponent of their Sxore product which "brings identity and reputation to blogging".
Oddly, for a guy who seemingly earns his living writing about the Identity Management products of the big advertisers software companies, he disses "Big Identity." What's up with that?
First, the dissing:
Today, mainstream identity relies on large-scale identity providers, PKI, certificates and a large, well-financed infrastructure supporting this system. Corporations buy into it because the U.S. tax laws allow them to write off the investment. Well, and because there's been nothing better available. Also, it hasn't really been about identity or trust but about liability and how to reduce it - or pawn it off on someone else.
Still, as user-centric identity gains strength, the whole PKI certificate structure will become irrelevant. Individuals haven't the money to support such a system, the time to try to understand how it works and how to implement it or the desire to push off liability to the next guy.
Strong language. Straight from the shoulder? Wow. That's an authentic voice.
Identity is a very multi-faceted issue. It has extremely different stakeholders and requirements. Dave stepped off into a fringe discussion of User-Centric (the only stakeholder that matters is MEEEEE kind of space) Identity. Symas probably couldn't agree more with Dave's views from that perspective. But we couldn't agree less about the corporate systems. The Identity Management needs of the Enterprise are underserved by the technology (expensive though it may be). What's there is still largely inadequate and hard to use, but it's essential that change in the next few years if Enterprises are going to effectively put audit and controls into their internal processes and systems.
The personal and the enterprise discussions of Identity are virtually unrelated. Treating them as "an issue" does a disservice to both. This article, unfortunately, appears to do just that.
Interesting read and interesting thoughts, though, if you ignore the problems.
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