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February 13, 2003
Why Digital Identity Matters
Jon Udell is pointing to column he wrote in 2001 that reviews Jeremy Rifkin's book The Age of Access. In Jon's column, he gives what I think is the most succinct explanation about why digital identity matters:
Rifkin's central theme is simply stated. We are entering a new stage of capitalism. Its defining principle is no longer ownership of property bought and sold in markets, but rather access to services leased within networks of suppliers and users. As consumers, and as businesses, we spend less on one-time purchases, and more on subscriptions to a growing array of services. Many of these services are delivered through electronic networks -- electricity, Internet connectivity, online content. But as Rifkin points out, tangible things -- cars, computers, office buildings, and inventory -- are also "dematerializing" into services. Ownership of such things is becoming a liability, something to outsource.
In a property regime, commercial transactions can be (relatively) anonymous, and are of brief duration. I walked into a local computer store a few months ago, and paid $25 in cash for a PC video adapter. The proprietor might or might not recognize me on the street; might or might not have a record of that transaction; might or might not have any further contact with me. In an access regime, transactions are never anonymous, always recorded, and embedded within a long-term relationship.
One of the prices that we pay for the convenience of using services, rather than owning products, is the burden of repeated authentication. I have to identify myself, every time, to gain access. Whether I do so directly, with my own name, or indirectly, by way of a pseudonym, is a matter of architecture and policy, and will determine whether or how the slippery concept of privacy will govern my use of the service. But the fact is that some real or pseudonymous identity is a condition of access.
I once had an IT director at the state ask me why anyone cared about directories and single sign-on. They argued vociferously that we were wasting our time putting together a master directory. Their day probably involved one authentication to the Novell file server and not much else. In that world, who cares. But in the world envisioned by Rifkin, we could be authenticating more or less continuously in one form or another. I'll let my digital proxy (like my cell phone) do that for me, thank-you very much.
09:50 PM | Recommend This | Print This
An Open Source, For Profit Project
Andre Durand and Eric Nolan reminded me that PingID and SourceID represent exactly the kind of symbiotic relationship between an open source project and for-profit company I was mentioning. Note that SourceID uses a "public source" license. (Disclaimer: I'm a PingID advisor.)
06:02 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Knowledge Management from the Inside Out
I had another opportunity to spend some time with Cogito. Cogito's current products represent a form of content management for engineering documents (everything from schematics to detail drawings). As we were talking, I began to see them as doing knowledge management and collaboration, but from the inside out.
When a traditional collaboration company (maybe too young a field to be calling anyone "traditional" but bear with me) like Groove approaches collaboration and knowledge management, they view the archive of team data as the artifact and build a meta model of the archive in an attempt to provide an understanding of the information to the team, allow them to make better use of it, and provide a collaboration vehicle. In many cases, that archive of information is a collection of representations of some mental concept that is collectively shared by the team.
As an example, consider a Boeing 777. There are millions of engineering drawings and other documents and hundreds of databases that collectively represent the archive of information about any particular 777 design. The design process consists of engineers and others building this archive of information to represent the mental map they collectively share of what a 777 is. Now, suppose that you could build a representation of that mental map from this archive in such a way that the entire archive could be thrown out because any piece of it can be regenerated at will. What's more, any changes to the artifacts in the archive update the model and consequently any other document associated with that artifact is automatically updated as well.
This represents an alternative approach to knowledge management that I think of as "inside-out." Instead of building a model of the archive on the outside, you build a model of the concepts---the things inside the artifacts that make up the archive.
This may all sound too good to be true, but Cogito has real contracts with real companies producing these models on the scale I've described here. Their revenues are modest to date, but have a significant partner that should provide an excellent channel for selling their technology. I think that deep down, there's a connection between what Cogito is doing and what the semantic web is attempting, but two and one half hours wasn't enough time to ferret that out.