Towards the end of 2019, I was invited to deliver a keynote at the OpenID Foundation Summit in Japan. At a very personal level, the January 2020 Summit was an opportunity to spend time with dear friends from around the world. It would be the last time I saw Kim Cameron in person. It would include a dinner with the late Vittorio Bertocci. And it was my last “big” trip before the COVID lock down. At the Summit, I was asked to talk about the “Future of Identity.” It was a bit of a daunting topic since I am no real futurist and haven’t been an industry analyst for a long time. So I set about writi ..read more

I was talking to a long time competitor/colleague/client/friend this week about identity governance and a variety of other identity topics. We were commenting that in some regards access certification and access policies have been stuck in bubble of amber: not a lot of innovation save the addition of some cluster analysis (marketed as AI.) In the course of the conversation I remember that a long time ago I had written a piece on the use of negative policy spaces for access governance. My buddy thought it would be fun to dig it up a repost it. So of I went to find this… What’s funny (at least t ..read more

What follows is a take on what I learned as Salesforce moved to require all of its customers to use MFA. There’s plenty more left on the cutting room floor but it will definitely give you a flavor for the experience. If you don’t want to read all this you can check out the version I delivered at Identiverse 2022. i Thank you. It is an honor and a privilege to be here on the first day of Identiverse. I want to thank Andi and the entire program team for allowing me to speak to you today. This talk is an unusual one for me. I have had the pleasure and privilege to be here on stage before. But in ..read more

Reification. I learned that word from Kim. In the immediate next breath he said from the stage that he was told not everyone knew what reify meant and that he would use a more approachable word: “thingify.” And therein I learned another lesson from Kim about how to present to an audience. My memories of Kim come in three phases: Kim as Legend, Kim as Colleague, and Kim as Human, and with each phase came new things to learn. My first memories of Kim were of Kim as Legend. I think the very first was from IIW 1 (or maybe 2 – the one in Berkeley) at which he presented InfoCard. He owned the stage ..read more

Some on the next 10-ish years in identity management. [This was originally written in December 2019: pre-pandemic, pre-US presidential election, pre-George Floyd. Truly, it was written in the “Before Times.” I thought about updating this before posting but that felt wrong – somehow dishonest. So here is the lightly touched up text of my talk which was given first in Tokyo at the OpenID Foundation Summit and then again as part of the all-virtual Identiverse. If you want to skip the text and go straight to the video, you can!  My deepest thanks go to Naohiro Fujie and Nat Sakimura for prom ..read more

[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 ..read more