rfi User-Centric Identity article for Business Communications Review

All:

Hi. I'm back. I've been giving the blog a relative rest for the past several months for various unimportant reasons.

These past few years, I've been following the frenetic industry activity surrounding user-centric identity, including the announcements at this week's RSA Security Conference. Especially Microsoft's commitment to converging CardSpace with OpenID.

Just a few days ago, one of my fondest professional associates--Sandy Borthick of Business Communications Review--contacted me and asked for an article on user-centric identity for BCR's May issue. I love Sandy for many unimportant reasons, one of them being that she drops juicy topics in my lap, and lets me develop them as I see fit. I try not to disappoint (case in point: the piece on Master Data Management in this month's issue, leveraging the MDM maturity model I'm developing in my main gig, as Principal Analyst at Current Analysis).

Anyway, this BCR piece is, of course, a freelance assignment that doesn't have much direct relationship with my core coverage areas at Current Analysis (though lotsa folks know that I covered federated identity management and tons of other stuff in my Burton Group days, so it's not that huge of a stretch for me....a dirty little secret about Jim Kobielus is that I never stop covering anything that I covered at one point in my career...for me, everything's a cumulative building process....I'm synthesizing all of this old and new stuff in my head at all times....I'm a "synthesist" (putting things together) as well as an "analyst" (pulling them apart)....a fact that some people fail to comprehend...but they need to). My life, my career, is one big crazy mash-up.

Anyway, enough about me and more about YOU. Or, more to the point, anybody in the user-centric identity community (OpenId, Higgins, Bandit, LiD, OSIS, CardSpace, SXIP, Yadis, Identity Commons, OpenXRI, iNames, Passel, mIDM, Liberty ID-WSF, etc.) who'd like to share their thoughts with me...I'd like to speak with you. Just to keep this all from impinging on my main gig, just send me a quick e-mail to james_kobielus@hotmail.com to open up discussions. I want to speak with you at a time convenient for us both (preferably evenings and weekends, the way I've been managing my freelance work in the 20+ years I've spent in this industry---god i'm old). I'll contact several of you under my own initiative.

But I'm putting out this all-points "request for interaction" to the user-centric identity community. The BCR piece won't be hugely long, and it won't necessarily break any new ground. You folks, collectively, are doing a wonderful job developing this promising new realm of the IdM universe. I just want to get my arms around it all. Communicate it all clearly to BCR's readers.

And press it deeper into my main groove.

Jim