- VRM2008 with Doc Searls January 24th, 2008
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I just got confirmation from Doc Searls, that he will be coming to VRM2008 and EIC. We therefore now officially opened registration for the VRM2008 unconference, which will be taking place on 21st April until 22nd April at the EIC location (Forum am Deutschen Museum) in Munich. Registration for VRM2008 is free of charge.
VRM, or Vendor Relationship Management, is the reciprocal of CRM or Customer Relationship Management. It provides customers with tools for engaging with vendors in ways that work for both parties.
The unconference format is not yet very well known over here. Therefore a wikipedia definition: “An unconference is a conference where the content of the sessions is created and managed by the participants (generally day-by-day during the course of the event) rather than by one or more organizers in advance of the event. The term is primarily used in the geek community. “
- Identity (Risk) Management and Metrics January 23rd, 2008
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One of the emerging topics in Identity Management is Identity Risk Management. An important part of this are Identity Risk Metrics, e.g. defined metrics for the risks which are related to digital identities. That isn’t limited to security and compliance risks, but includes cost and performance risks as well. Identity Risk Metrics thus are an interesting tool not only to manage risks but to measure and optimize IT.
If you focus on aspects like performance risks then you can discuss whether it is really about risks – or, in general, about improvements in IT. The approach of Identity Risk Management and the related metrics can be easily expanded to an approach of IT metrics and thus be used to measure and improve IT.
Our Workshop on Identity Risk Management to be held on April 25th will discuss the potential of Identity Risk Metrics in depth, showing how this concept can be used to not only show risks but to gain business values and improve IT.
- The real relationship of BSM and IAM January 23rd, 2008
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BSM, e.g. Business Service Management, is one of today’s most important buzzwords in IT. It’s related to ITIL and ISO 20000, thus it is about managing IT and the IT processes. BSM is definitely more than the former systems management, but currently it is – in most cases – IT service management and not business service management. That’s because the focus is on IT services and not on business services.
Let me explain this in the context of IAM. If you use a virtual directory to define “identity storage services” which abstract the physical identity stores like directories from the applications you provide services. These can be managed in the BSM paradigm, following for example the ITIL v3 approaches. But in that case you provide IT services. A business service, in contrast, shall start at the business level. Take a contract and define how it is handled in IT. A business service defines proper contract handling, e.g. how it is stored, how it is archived, how information rights are applied to shield the contract, who is allowed to access it in which way and so on. Thus you could define such a business service which involves many different IT services. But in most cases, today’s business service management is far away from that level – it focuses on IT service management (ITSM), a buzzword which is used less often than BSM…
The second interesting aspect of relationship between IAM and BSM is about the question whether there is any advantage of buying IAM from the BSM vendor. There might be, for sure: Enterprise license contracts, sometimes familiar architectures and interfaces, trust in the vendor, and other advantages a single-vendor-strategy offers. But sometimes BSM vendors try to convince me that there are advantages due to the tight integration of their IAM offering in the BSM offering. That’s an interesting position. If there were such an advantage it could only be because the BSM doesn’t optimally integrate different existing technologies. But BSM has to support all the services from all systems, hasn’t it? Thus is should support identity services from any identity management solution, regardless of the vendor. A BSM for (only or mainly) a vendor’s own tools isn’t sufficient.
Given this, it might make sense to buy IAM from your BSM vendor because of the general advantages mentioned above. But it shouldn’t be because the BSM vendors IAM is the only one to be managed by the vendors BSM. Then you should rethink the BSM decision, honestly spoken.
This relationship and some other interesting aspects of the BSM market will be discussed on April 25th at the BSM forum which will be held first time as part of the European Identity Conference 2008 – a BSM forum which obviously is around BSM and IAM. More about the specific topics and the speakers to be announced soon…
- Federation & User Centric Showcase - Call for Proposals November 5th, 2007
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During the 2nd European Identity Conference, a business-oriented showcase will demonstrate, how information flows to, from and about individuals will be changed by federation and user centric related standards and innovations, if applied to existing and new business models. We strongly encourage all exhibitors to propose applications and service models for this showcase. The purpose of it is not just to demonstrate interoperability, as this is already part of the federation and user centric concepts. It is to show real world applications and business models taking advantage of what makes federation and user centric technologies so different to classical/legacy infrastructures for conducting business and providing social interaction b2b, c2b and c2c.
Kuppinger Cole will collect your proposals and moderate your collaboration with the other participants of this showcase, so that each single element of such an infrastructure will contribute to the picture as a whole.
Some examples we would like to see in this showcase:
- Identity Routing (virtual directories)
- Cross-community collaboration
- OpenID and CardSpace business models
- “Trust-Providers” and “Identity Agents”
- Virtual ID Cards
- Open Source Solutions
- Post-CRM applications (i.e. Vendor Relationship Management VRM)
If you would like to propose a contribution, just email Joerg Resch: [email protected]
- Dave Kearns to come to Munich September 27th, 2007
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Dave Kearns, a writer and consultant in Silicon Valley and well known for his identity management newsletter at network world, will join the European Identity Conference as a keynote speaker and moderator of 2 tracks on context based authentication and mobile identity.
