In Context

Dave Kearns has written an article explaining that, if solutions are architected correctly, there’s no meaningful difference between the two. He writes:

We start by defining identity as a group of “personas” (see “Defining identity, persona, role”). Any persona can be made up of a group of personas or roles. Each of those personas can be linked, or separated, as the entity identified by them wishes. One of those personas is (or, rather, could be) an “enterprise persona.” That one brings together “…all the activities and attributes of a single entity” performed for or related to that enterprise “into a readily accessible (and reportable and auditable) form.”

So there is no “user-centric” or “enterprise-centric” identity. There is just an entity with AN identity made up of various personas some of which may be controlled or limited in some way by an outside organization – not only by the enterprise but also by governments, social organizations, etc. The ability to keep these personas separate, where legally able to do so, must be a given. Each persona will have different identity needs and requirements, of course, but that’s what will drive the “identity economy” as vendors seek to satisfy those needs and requirements in accordance with the laws. The government’s laws, the enterprise’s “laws”, the fraternal and social organization’s “laws” and the Laws of Identity as laid down by Cameron.

I really didn’t understand this when I started the Higgins project back in 2003. I was trying to scratch a personal itch. I wanted a personal dashboard that would pull together all of my profiles and social relationships. I felt like my various personas and buddy lists were scattered all over the web in hundreds of silos/sites.

Later when my colleague Mary Ruddy described the Higgins project to Jamie Lewis, Jamie suggested that we talk to Tony Nadalin (IBM) and Kim Cameron. My initial reaction was “no,” and “no way” [respectively]. I figured that I was working on a user-centric solution that would work for me, as an individual. So why would we talk to IBM, they sell to enterprises [so surely what we're working on can't be of interest]. And as for talking to Microsoft (I didn’t know Kim at the time)…why would I talk to the folks that brought us Hailstorm and Passport?

As history has shown, I was wrong on both counts. Luckily, Jamie was persuasive and Mary was insistent. We have since joined forces with Tony and Kim. Tony explained to us that the problems facing the enterprise were extremely relevant to Higgins and that there was no conflict. And Kim (and later Mike Jones and others) won us over by showing that Microsoft could be a good actor in this space. [So much so that the Higgins project decided to invest a ton of resources on making sure that its "card-based" metaphor and file formats were a pure super-set conceptually, functionally, and architecturally WRT CardSpace.]