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I'm delivering one of the morning presentations at the OCG IDA summit next week, entitled "Building a Strategic IDA Infrastructure".

A wonderful article about The Stig and Identity Management on the OCG Website. Whoever wrote that must be a genius of the first order as well as a handsome and likeable chap. I wonder who it was?

I was reading a pretty good (if a little bland) piece on PKI today on the ZDNet announcments newsletter, when it suddenly struck me that I couldn't remember the last time anyone actually dared to say the "P" word aloud. It feels as if PKI has been airbrushed from history at the moment: we talk about strong authentication or certificate lifecycle management, but PKI itself seems tarred with the same brush as X.500 and other nasty, difficult, unsexy old hat directory stuff. So much so that if you see the Gartner hype curve for IdM (I don't have a link, sorry), you'll notice that PKI doesn't even appear. There is no PKI; there never was PKI; no-one here ever said there was or recommended you deploy it; move along, there is nothing to see.

PS. Read the comment from one disgruntled ZDNet reader for a chuckle.

I know, it’s a bit of a tedious cliché, but what the heck. It’s traditional for article writers and bloggers to either do a list of predictions or to list their resolutions for the New Year. I haven’t a clue what’s going to happen in the IAM world next year (more of the same, I imagine), so I decided instead to have a stab at some resolutions. Not for me personally though, for all of us involved in IAM.

I facilitated an IAM workshop at a famous University not a million miles away from our offices last week. As always, there was plenty of debate from the floor, but a topic arose which generated more heat than others: whether or not an enterprise directory should contain a rich data set imported from other applications, directories and databases, or whether it should simply contain a pointer back to the source data itself.

We were discussing the main causes of RBAC projects failing this week at Oxford. The discussion is sure to go on, as there are probably as many reasons for failure as there are roles in most organizations (which is many), but I offer here five of my personal favourites. Before I elaborate though, we should first perhaps clarify what I’m talking about when I mean “an RBAC project” (as others may have different definitions or mental models).

Not my temporary Blogspot blog, the original DIM Report is back in all its tawdry glory (real or imagined)!