Talks, Podcasts, and Videos
-
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.
Read more -
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.
Read more -
Round Wheel talk from the IRM Summit
Here’s my “Do we have a round wheel yet?” talk from the recent IRM Summit in Dublin.
(This is actually the video from my version of this talk earlier in the year from a similar event in London. The Dublin video got taken offline… - IG 11/05/2026)
-
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.)
-
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.
Read more
