Recent thoughts and media appearances
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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.]
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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. Customer identity is an amazing opportunity for identity professionals everywhere. Don’t treat your customers like your employees. Start delighting them.
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FAQ for Building a Presentation
I’ve been collecting questions I get about my thoughts on how to build a presentation. Here are, in no particular order, some of the top ones and my answers.
Does this work for every kind of presentation?
Hell no! It works well, for me, for keynotes. It works well for building talks that are presentation, performances. It will not work well for lectures and workshops. It will not work well if what you actually need is documentation. See Tufte on that one.
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Showing my work
A few weeks back I posted my 9 step process for building a presentation. I wanted to share some example of that process in action. What follows are glimpses of my “No person is an island” talk which I delivered at Defrag in November.
Step 1 - Finding the Nucleus
I had two quotes that served as the nucleus for this deck.
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The Identity Philosophers Song
With all due apologies to Monty Python and specifically Eric Idle here’s the identity industry’s version of the Philosophers Song. Many thanks to everyone who helped this effort and huge thanks to Eve Maler for all her work on this. What follows is meant with much love and respect to everyone in the industry (mentioned or not). And with that… maestro please: Jeremy Grant was a real pissant Who was very rarely stable iglazer, iglazer was a boozy beggar who could think you under the table Blakley whom could out-consume Madsen, Bradley, and Dingle Pat Patterson was a beery swine Who was just as schloshed as Cahill There’s nothing Wilton couldn’t teach ya’ Bout the raising of the wrist. Cameron himself was permanently pissed… George Fletcher, still, of his own free will, On half a pint of shandy was particularly ill. Nishant K could stick it away; Half a crate of whiskey every day. Patrick Harding, Patrick Harding was a bugger for white lightning Nash was fond of his dram, Really Dick Hardt was a drunken fart “I drink, therefore I am” Yes, Cameron himself is particularly missed; A lovely little thinker but a bugger when he’s pissed! And if none of that made sense to you, here’s the original which also might not make much sense either.
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