National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace

On Friday (25 June 2010) the White House blog posted information and links on the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace .

This is a very important work that of course will directly affect Digital Identity Management.  There is lots of commentary in the DiDM space.

Customer Conversations Are Changing

"The long-held notion that companies control the conversation is being challenged by social media."

http://www.fastcompany.com/article/how-social-media-upending-enterprise

I couldn't have said it better myself.  This statement is true for both internal and external customers.  Organizations will need to let go of the conversation and be willing to address their constituents in the method of their choice.  Organizations will also need to manage and leverage the knowledge generated by these new conversation methods.

Login with you favorite ID

You can now login to comment on KM News posts using your favorite digitial ID - AOL, facebook, Google, Windows Live ID, Yahoo or OpenID.

This really cool capability comes courtesy of RPX from JanRain.

Generational Shift

There has been lots of conversations lately about generational shifts in communication methods.  This presentation from Dr. Pete Markiewicz is very informative.  The communication methods and approaches to work will become more evident as Millennials make their way deeper into the global workforce.

The Millennial Generation, technology and work


There are those that cross the generational boundaries of communication.  As an example I would fall into what the presentation terms GenX but many of my communications modes are "Millennial".  I am adapting, sometimes slower than my children would like, but I am adapting.  There are those that have no interest or even understanding that they need to adapt.  Not just adapt to survive, but adapt so that there is a cross generational polination of ideas and knowledge transfer.

[amtap book:isbn=0971260605]

Politics Of Collaboration

A must read post by David Coleman of Collaborative Strategies - The Political Conundrum of Collaboration.  David walks us through the various collaboration technologies that vex the CIO/IT team in organizations but empower people and processes.

I can especially relate to the story of the "Disgruntled Collaborator". 

Many IT departments today fail to understand that you can not and should not always take the traditional project management/systems development life-cycle approach to organizational collaboration (process or tools).  I am not saying to throw process out the window, but collaboration involves people, process, and technology and screams for a more iterative (collaborative!) approach to defining the need, picking the tool, and implementing the process and tool.  The process needs to take days or weeks not months or years.

Moving forward with collaboration is not an all or nothing proposition.  I am a firmly believe that an organization, no matter its size, needs to form a strategy for leveraging knowledge.  But, not having a strategy in place should not keep you from moving forward with solutions that empower and enhance productivity.  This is especially true given the low cost of SaaS (software as a service) collaboration technologies.  You can start down a path that provides immediate value and then as the strategy and architecture around knowledge management and collaboration are formalized a reevaluation of the current solutions can be undertaken.

The bottom line is that collaboration and collaborative technologies are all about connectedness.

Get on the Identity Bus

The Identity Bus

I am all in favor of a standardized service in support of the seamless exchange of identity data. At present, public facing services need to support an alphabet soup of methods for 'sharing' identity data.

It is great for those of us interested in the technical nits and nats to converse about this, but in order to have full scale adoption of identity interoperability it needs to be seamless and mindless. Mindless in the sense the the end user of a system, web site, etc., does not have to think about which credential to use to gain access to a resource.

The thing I am having a lot of trouble understanding is why anyone would want to re-label this as LDAP. The use of LDAP has been so bastardized already, why add more confusion to. History: LDAP is a protocol for accessing data stored in a directory (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol). The term has been used incorrectly for many years. If it is a directory, why can't we just call a directory a directory?

I'm thinking out loud here, but this identity 'bus' should be called something like the IBS - Identity Bus Service...

Federated Collaboration

There is a nice piece in KM World about collaboration 3.0 - The Collaboration 3.0 approach.  We won't go into a discussion of the '3.0'.  What I found interesting is what I call Federated Collaboration.

The author does not use the term Federated Collaboration, but he is refering to it in describing how Boeing is using it to build design and build the new Dreamliner aircarft (B787).  Boeing is designing and building this aircraft collaboratively with its business partners through the use collaborative technology.  This is amazing in itself and undoubtedly has cost Boeing an impressive amount of resources.

Key issues raised in the article are compliance, informatinon security, governance.  These issues must be addressed via some mechanism.  A mechanism that is often overlooked by the knowledge management and collaboration community.  That mechanism in my opinion is Federated Digital Identity.  There can be no high value federated collaboration without an underlying understanding of WHO is collaborating, WHAT they can collaborate on, WHEN the can have collaborative access, and HOW they have access to the collaborative environment.  This can only be accomplished when a common framework for digital identity is used - Federated Digital Identity.