Daily Archives: December 5, 2007

Nishant Kaushik has this very interesting post about enterprise adoption of User Centric concepts. My experience talking about User Centric with my enterprise customers is quite different from Nishant’s. First almost none of my enterprise customers are interested in Information Cards or OpenID. Most haven’t heard about the concepts yet. But they really want User Centric Identity. The want it very badly. They just call it something different. They call it User Self-Service.

In other words the want the users to be responsible for every scrap of information for which they are the authoritative source of information. They want users to be responsible for managing their own credentials (typically passwords, but sometimes SecureID tokens). In some cases they want users to be responsible for determining what systems they should be granted access and making workflow requests to get that access.

Of course some will argue that using a Self-issued Information Card is User Centric, where as entering the same information into a self-service profile application is not. But my customers don’t care either way. So long as users can manage their own personal information without using help-desk or HR personnel, they are happy.

(Mirrored from TalkBMC)