Revisting "Ends and Means"

Chris Ceppi has two posts that play well off each other and help illustrate the dichotomy between personal digital identity and enterprise identity management systems. In the first post, Chris plays off Stefan Brand’s attempt to differentiate between the two, in which he says “comparing ‘personal’ identity management to federated enterprise identity management is like comparing bicycles to airplanes.” In the second post, Chris talks about the limits of self assertion. Chris makes some good points, many of which are largely consistent with some previous posts of my own.

Both of Chris’s posts, as well as Stefan’s, echo my own attempt of almost two years ago to differentiate between personal digital identity and enterprise identity management in “Ends and Means: Identity in Two Worlds.” Speaking of that piece, which I had forgotten about, I came across a reference to it courtesy of P. T. Ong the other day, who posted a link to a paper by Tim Grayson called “Digital Identity Religion and Information Dogma.” I’m not sure why I hadn’t seen it sooner, but Grayson says that he wrote the paper in response to my “Ends and Means” piece, and I appreciate P. T.’s posting the link to it. 

Grayson’s paper takes an interesting tack, pointing to the basic underlying issue of identity information ownership (which he calls “the dogma of information ownership”). It talks about two extremes views of information ownership (Subjectivist and Objectivist), and how to achieve the right balance between those extremes.

Grayson seems to have gathered from “Ends and Means” that I think the “consumerist and corporatist views” of identity management “shall meet eventually in some state of balanced dissatisfaction.” My point in that piece, though, was to make the point I’ve made in other places: that one size does not fit all, that both sides need to do what fits their needs, and that need a metasystem that will allow them not to just co-exist, but to interoperate as needed. To me, that’s not a “state of balanced dissatisfaction,” but one of appropriate balance and enablement.

At the very end of the Grayson’s paper, I came across this quote, which is a great way to describe the basic idea of the unifying metasystem:

“We ought to get used to the idea of a digital identity topography that is situational and contextual; that makes information control and system mechanics negotiated; and that provides for many substantially interoperable alternatives that support the negotiated solutions.”

If Grayson’s saying that this solution will balance the equation, and that’s what we need, then we’re certainly in agreement. And in the quote above, I like his use of the terms “situational” as well as “contextual”, and the notion of negotiated mechanics. It is precisely in the space between the “corporatist and consumerist” (or Ends and Means) that the metasystem will enable the negotiations that will allow the two worlds to meet and work together.