Recent thoughts and media appearances
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On Identity Standards: Do we have a round wheel yet?
The good people over at Ping Identity have posted the videos of the keynotes. So check out my talk on the state of identity standards and whether we have a round wheel yet! (My talk starts around minute 26.)
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Do we have a round wheel yet? Part 2 of my musings on identity standards
Yesterday I talked about the state of identity standards with regards to authentication and authorization. Today I’ll cover attributes, user provisioning, and where we ought to go as an industry.
Attributes
The wheel of attributes is roundish. There are two parts to the attribute story: access and representation. We can access attributes… sorta. There’s no clear winner that is optimized for the modern web. We’ve got graph APIs, ADAP, and UserInfo Endpoints – not to mention proprietary APIs as well. Notice I added the constraint of “optimized for the modern web.” If remove that constraint, then we could say that access to attributes is a fully solved problem: LDAP. But we are going to need a protocol that enables workers in the modern web to access attributes… and LDAP ain’t it. As for a standardized representation, we have one. Name-value pairs. In fact, name-value pairs might be the new comma. And although NVP are ubiquitous, we don’t have a standard schema. What is the inetOrgPerson of a new generation? There is no inetOrgPerson for millennial developers to use. But does that even matter? We could take SCIM’s schema and decree it to be the standard. But we all know, that each of us would extend the hell out of it. Yes we started with a standard schema, but every service provider’s schema is nearly unique.
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Do we have a round wheel yet? Musings on identity standards (Part 1)
Don’t want to read all of this? Check out the video:
Why do human continually seem to reinvent what they already have? Why is it that we take a reasonably functional thing and attempt to rebuild it and in doing so render that reasonably functional thing non-functional for a while? This is a pattern that is familiar. You have a working thing. You attempt to “fix” it and in doing so break it. You then properly fix it and get a slightly more functional thing in the end. Why is it that we reinvent the wheel? Because eventually, we get a round one. Anyone who has worked on technical standards, especially identity standards, recognizes this pattern. We build reasonably workable standards only to rebuild and recast them a few years later. We do this not because we develop some horrid allergy to angle brackets - an allergy that can only be calmed by mustache braces. This is not why we reinvent the wheel, why we revisit and rebuild our standards. Furthermore, revisiting and rebuilding standards isn’t simply a “make-work” affair for identity geeks. Nor is it an excuse to rack up frequent flyer miles.
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The Laws of Relationships (A Work in Progress) In Progress
A few weeks back I had the pleasure of delivering my ideas for the Laws of Relationships. The Laws are meant to be design considerations to everyone building, deploying, or consumer identity relationship management services. The team at ForgeRock, our hosts at the IRM Summit, were kind enough to video the talks. What follows is both a video of my delivery as well as the slides themselves. I am very much interested in getting feedback on this. I want to channel the response into the Kantara Initiative Working Group that is forming around IRM.
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The Laws of Relationships (A Work In Progress)
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.
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