17 April 2006 - 13:04An Identity Management Rant
Apropos of nothing. I was reading the RSS feeds and ran into an article I simply won't bother linking to. It was a thinly veiled commercial for yet another Identity Management conference and the prose just got to me. Follow the "more" link for the rant, if you care.
Cue the breathless prose. CUT to the windblown reporter outside an impressive looking building sounding like he's quoting from the Oracle at Delphi. Take a sound-bite from some white haired dinosaur, preferably WAY out of context. Look, dude, the usual suspects will show up. Your pitch is merely fluff and less interesting than the Budweiser ad I've seen over 100 times.
Two questions, who will be the first CEO/Chairman-of-the-Board fired for this? And when will my mother/wife/daughter(s) be asking about which or any of these matter?
People are not as fickle as us super-early adopters that flit from doomed startup to doomed startup and get frustrated that we can't just let some magical SSO system keep us from having to Log-In. Real people bond with a small number of sites a year (decade) so this isn't a problem for them. It isn't a enough of a problem to real people such that they're going to be willing to sign up and make it look like the rediculous answers were valuable.
The only senior executives at risk are the CEOs and architects fanning this "problem" into a convention feeding frenzy. The heads of the start-ups, particularly those who've already sold themselves to the Vulture Venture Capitalists, are at risk if people miss the point in droves. And, I predict, they will because they don't realize that his problem bothers them (which means it isn't one). Our non-Tech-industry loved ones will never really seriously ask about it because people are (incrementally) making it all easier. Besides, signing up is part of the "joining" mentality ... it's a GOOD THING™ ... it makes the new "member" feel important and valuable. They get ACCEPTED. They are now IN.
You know, people who stampede to get transponders for their cars so they can be tracked whenever and wherever they go, who key in their phone numbers at the supermarket, who use their loyalty program numbers anytime they get a chance, and who ignore the surveillance cameras omnipresent in their lives have given up anonymity. It's simply not an issue for them. They salivate at free credit rating scoring that represents aggregation of all their most private information. Give me a break. Identity Management is on thin ice, in my opinion and this user-centric Identity Management is as important to the masses of consumers as the impact of the Dead Sea scrolls on Roman Catholic dogma.
Sorry to pick your blog to dump this sad position on [I wimped out and didn't post this there], but the sales pitch for yet another content-free convention on a non-problem just sent me over the edge! The Identity Bubble is as fragile as the housing bubble or the Web 2.0 bubble or any other content-free bubble. Can we turn our attention to protecting the assets of important organizations (public and provate sector) and ignore the non-problem in consumer-space?
Turning serious for a moment. Real directories with "see also" attributes and real federation could go a long way to solving this simply and within existing IETF RFCs. Of course, the greed-driven Closed Source world wouldn't put anything simple and effective in front of "shareholder value", would they?
Maybe I'm getting cynical? 
... Marty
one comment:
The Marty Heyman, of Symas even :) ... Hi SuperPat and thanks for reading my stuff. The point of the rant is that Sarbanes Oxley (as a class of threats to management and corporations, is a real and pressing issue while the “Identity Gang” and “Laws of Identity” thrust feels, to us, like a technology area that’s fun to play with and seeking users/buyers. Having said that, we’re deeply committed to activating HP OpenView (and any other that gets the message) Identity Management and Federation suite on Connexitor Directory Services, our distribution of OpenLDAP. We’re musicians and lovers, not fighters. We’re the directory guys and would expect that Identity Management suite developers will recognize the value of the Directory as a superior database for their work and let us compete to be the database (Directory) vendor. HP OpenView Identity seems to have gotten the message, for example.)
Having said that, the Liberty comment is, in fact, confusing, misleading, and just too snarky in the midst of that rant and is gone :
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