15 December, 2005 - 12:49pm

Industry analyst firm, the Burton Group, has now archived an excellent audiocast on User-Centric Identity Management and the Enterprise: Why Empowering Users is Good Business (unfortunately only available to subscribers). Analyst Mike Neuenschwander explores the work to date on this emerging technology, proclaiming it to be possibly the greatest advancement in IdM since LDAP. He also interviews Paul Trevithick of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, for the last half of the telebriefing. They discuss the need for an identity metasystem, privacy issues, how to build trust, and problems in getting there.

As well, Mike describes the differences between domain-centric Identity 1.0 and user-centic Identity 2.0 approaches to IdM and notes that it is still early days before we have user-centric IdM, but that products and standards are coming. Paul agrees that it's early, noting that presently there are islands of user-centric identity, which need to link together in a trusted infrastructure. They both cover the question of a user-centric business model, suggesting that it will not be the user who will pay for identity services, but rather the relying and/or identity provider that will provide the infrastructure.