Personal Data Services Model (Pensive White Paper)

Hi Peter

Sorry I can't find the original email with the link that relates to this.

I had a quick look again today. It's been a few years since I read it.

As you know, it's kind of 'preaching to the converted' for us, since the NZ solution substantially answers the questions raised in this paper. We used it - not so much to inform our direction in what is now branded igovt, because we had it pretty much in hand back in 2006 - but to confirm our direction. And that, it still does, so thanks!

I'd make a couple of observations.

The first is that many of the pleas for standardisation made in the paper are coming to pass. Perhaps not in the way Pensive might have envisaged, but nonetheless…

The second is rise and rise of social networking and the growing up of generation Y/Z is seeing some interesting trends in our view. The first is that its not that these folk don't care about their identity - they do - but they don't want it to get in the way of what they are doing. The current crop of identity solutions seem to enforce a specific 'identity and authentication' step in the end to end process flow, to get service. We think this is getting progressively out of step with today's - and more importantly tomorrow's - reality. We are starting to think a person's management of their identity in its whole sense, needs to be easy, light, dynamic and off-to-the-side, transparent if you will. It's not a technology choice thing, it's more a matter of how its implemented.

So we are starting to monitor more closely, stuff like Mozilla's very recent notion of 'authenticating the browser' than, say, pushing solutions that require the customer to do active decision-making (a kind of over focus on identity and authentication pushed by the solution which admittedly *does* solve the problem), in comparison with what we think customers may want (nothing scientific like research to back up my views here, except a sense we get form our igovt customer's feedback so please treat them with the distain they probably deserve).

For NZ, (and particularly for the team charged with 'sorting it'), we feel we can see the light at the end of the tunnel with the identity/authentication thing. But all that does is place the poor (authenticated) customer at the front door of a mountain far higher..authorisation and access control to online services, requiring a mix of identity related (if not identity) attributes to connect up the agencies serving those joined up services.

So all up, the paper still stands up to the tests of time, but the need for an update is starting to appear on the horizon.

Any use?

Cheers

Colin

Colin Wallis

Authentication Standards Manager, Government Technology Services

Department of Internal Affairs

New Zealand Government

PO Box 10-526, Wellington 6143

New Zealand

t: +64 4 463 1337

m: +64 27 244 7135

Alternative email: colin_wallis@hotmail.com

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