First Day Reflections from CIS Monterey.
Follow along on Twitter at #CISmcc (for the Monterey Conference Centre).
The Cloud Identity Summit really is the top event on the identity calendar. The calibre of the speakers, the relevance and currency of the material, the depth and breadth of the cohort, and the international spread are all unsurpassed. It's been great to meet old cyber-friends in "XYZ Space" at last -- like Emma Lindley from the UK and Lance Peterman. And to catch up with such talented folks like Steffen Sorensen from New Zealand once again.
A day or two before, Ian Glazer of Salesforce asked in a tweet what we were expecting to get out of CIS. And I replied that I hoped to change my mind about something. It's unnerving to have your understanding and assumptions challenged by the best in the field ... OK, sometimes it's outright embarrassing ... but that's what these events are all about. A very wise lawyer said to me once, around 1999 at the dawn of e-commerce, that he had changed his mind about authentication a few times up to that point, and that he fully expected to change his mind again and again.
I spent most of Saturday in Open Identity Foundation workshops. OIDF chair Don Thibeau enthusiastically stressed two new(ish) initiatives: Mobile Connect in conjunction with the mobile carrier trade association GSM Association @GSMA, and HIE Connect for the health sector. For the uninitiated, HIE means Health Information Exchange, namely a hub for sharing structured e-health records among hospitals, doctors, pharmacists, labs, e-health records services, allied health providers, insurers, drug & device companies, researchers and carers; for the initiated, we know there is some language somewhere in which the letters H.I.E. stand for "Not My Lifetime".
But seriously, one of the best (and pleasantly surprising) things about HIE Connect as the OIDF folks tell it, is the way its leaders unflinchingly take for granted the importance of privacy in the exchange of patient health records. Because honestly, privacy is not a given in e-health. There are champions on the new frontiers like genomics that actually say privacy may not be in the interests of the patients (or more's the point, the genomics businesses). And too many engineers in my opinion still struggle with privacy as something they can effect. So it's great -- and believe me, really not obvious -- to hear the HIE Connects folks -- including Debbie Bucci from the US Dept of Health and Human Services, and Justin Richer of Mitre and MIT -- dealing with it head-on. There is a compelling fit for the OAUTH and OIDC protocols here, with their ability to manage discrete pieces of information about users (patients) and to permission them all separately. Having said that, Don and I agree that e-health records permissioning and consent is one of the great UI/UX challenges of our time.
Justin also highlighted that the RESTful patterns emerging for fine-grained permissions management in healthcare are not confined to healthcare. Debbie added that the ability to query rare events without undoing privacy is also going to be a core defining challenge in the Internet of Things.
MyPOV: We may well see tremendous use cases for the fruits of HIE Exchange before they're adopted in healthcare!
In the afternoon, we heard from Canadian and British projects that have been working with the Open Identity Exchange (OIX) program now for a few years each.
Emma Lindley presented the work they've done in the UK Identity Assurance Program (IDAP) with social security entitlements recipients. These are not always the first types of users we think of for sophisticated IDAM functions, but in Britain, local councils see enormous efficiency dividends from speeding up the issuance of eg disabled parking permits, not to mention reducing imposters, which cost money and lead to so much resentment of the well deserved. Emma said one Attributes Exchange beta project reduced the time taken to get a 'Blue Badge' permit from 10 days to 10 minutes. She went on to describe the new "Digital Sources of Trust" initiative which promises to reconnect under-banked and under-documented sections of society with mainstream financial services. Emma told me the much-abused word "transformational" really does apply here.
MyPOV: The Digital Divide is an important issue for me, and I love to see leading edge IDAM technologies and business processes being used to do something about it -- and relatively quickly.
Then Andre Boysen of SecureKey led a discussion of the Canadian identity ecosystem, which he said has stabilised nicely around four players: Federal Government, Provincial Govt, Banks and Carriers. Lots of operations and infrastructure precedents from the payments industry have carried over.
Andre calls the smart driver license of British Columbia the convergence of "street identity and digital identity".
MyPOV: That's great news - and yet comparable jurisdictions like Australia and the USA still struggle to join governments and banks and carriers in an effective identity synthesis without creating great privacy and commercial anxieties. All three cultures are similarly allergic to identity cards, but only in Canada have they managed to supplement drivers licenses with digital identities with relatively high community acceptance. In nearly a decade, Australia has been at a standstill in its national understanding of smartcards and privacy.
For mine, the CIS Quote of the Day came from Scott Rice of the Open ID Foundation. We all know the stark problem in our industry of the under-representation of Relying Parties in the grand federated identity projects. IdPs and carriers so dominate IDAM. Scott asked us to imagine a situation where "The auto industry was driven by steel makers". Governments wouldn't put up with that for long.
Can someone give us the figures? I wonder if Identity and Access Management is already more economically ore important than cars?!
Cheers from Monterey, Day 1.