Posted 5:46 PM

Attention architects - BYOB

Pam Dingle posts today ("We’re a little lost.") about her disappointment, nay her disillusionment with the hodge-podge of identity services available to the average enterprise and the decided lack of a roadmap for connecting them up. She notes, "In reality, however, I don’t see a patchwork of complimentary products - I see a whole bunch of products with a whole bunch of overlap and no obvious or well-stated way for an Enterprise to figure out how to knit it all into an actual solution for their original problem. "

She's right, of course. There does need to be a roadmap, a diagram, a "well-stated way" to hook up all of these services so that they are complimentary and they do interoperate rather than compete for attention and bandwidth. It's an issue that came up at last spring's Internet Identity Workshop when Boeing's Marty Schleiff introduced a session called "Enterprise Identity Roadmap for enterprise identity architects: a discussion," and which I wrote about in the newsletter. What I said was:

So why IIW? In a nutshell, precisely because it wasn’t Catalyst or DIDW. Those structured conferences, dominated as they are by slideware presented by a speaker on a stage don’t lend themselves to free-form discussion. Certainly there are “Birds of a Feather” sessions – usually after hours in inconvenient locations. There are also informal get-togethers (usually involving libations) that go into the wee hours while knotty issues are discussed. But there doesn’t seem to be a venue for those involved in planning and implementing enterprise identity systems and architectures to meet in a vendor-neutral environment to swap stories, sound warnings and point out new initiatives. Marty wants to change that.

This seems to be as good a place as any to announce that we have found a venue. At the upcoming Digital ID World (Sept. 8-10 in Anaheim), Program Chair Eric Norlin has convinced me to moderate just such a session - me, a few microphones and (hopefully) an audience of enterprise identity architects - ready to talk about where they are, where they've been, where they hope to go and how they want to get there. If you've an interest in enterprise ID architecture (Pam, are you listening?) then I hope to see you in that audience.

Labels: Catalyst, DIDW, enterprise, identity