Talks, Podcasts, and Videos
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The Most Forgotten Thing In Identity Management
[What follows are some thoughts on usernames and identifiers. This was an extremely fun talk to put together. Many thanks as always to everyone who helped improve this talk including Chuck Mortimore and George Fletcher. – IG Sept 3 2019. If you don’t feel like reading everything, you check me out giving this talk at Identiverse in June of 2019.]
What I want to talk about
Usernames. They are the most forgotten, the most overlooked thing in our industry. They are, as we would say in the US, the “Gen X” of identity management. They show up; they do their job; they don’t get any credit. In fact, they do not get the same attention that their big brother “Password” and their little sister “Password-less” get. Instead, usernames do their job without thanks or recognition. But failing to pay attention to usernames can have major negative impacts to both B2B and B2C scenarios.
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Finding your secret strengths
To grow your skills, you must know your skills. Problem is, that’s harder than it sounds, if only because we rarely carve time out of our hectic lives to do so. Might as well use these next few minutes to do so, and this post will give give a technique to help you along. We cannot think about our skills in a vacuum. It’s a well researched fact that humans are horrible at assessing their own skills. We often inflate skills we do not have. We downplay skills we do have. Simply put, we lie to ourselves about the strength of our skills. We need inner honesty. We need outside voices. We need feedback… in order to examine these skills we have and those we don’t.
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The Moments Ahead for Identity
[My address to the European Identity Conference 2016. Although this starts like my TCP/IP Moment talk it goes in a very different direction. In some regards, I think this might be the most important talk I have ever written and delivered. Giving credit where credit is due - the ideas in this piece are the distillation of many many conversations over the years. I am deeply indebted to the following peers for their help, encouragement, ideas, and support: Allan Foster, Robin Wilton, Nat Sakimura, Josh Alexander, Chuck Mortimore, Joni Brennan, and Josh Nanberg.]
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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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