Digital Identity

Chapter 19. Identity Management Reference Architectures

When I was CTO at http://iMall.com, we were frequently pushing technology envelopes. A lot of the web technology that people take for granted now—such as application servers, templating frameworks, and even relational databases—were either not available or not widely used in building web sites. At the same time, new technologies were being developed at breakneck speed as people tried to create the scaffolding on which the World Wide Web would ultimately be erected.

As CTO, part of my job was to develop an overall technical strategy for the company and decide not only what products we'd build, but how we'd build them. I found that just picking a technology wasn't enough. Even if I understood the technology well and could see how it would fit into our overall system, communicating that vision to the system architects and developers was difficult. What I found myself doing, over and over again, was building a small pilot project that showed how a particular technology worked, how it fit into the suite of other technology choices we'd made, and why it was beneficial. There's something about a real design and working code that grounds a technology choice and makes it real.

The last six chapters have shown you how to create an IMA for your organization that guides design and implementation so as to encourage interoperability. In Chapter 17, we saw how an identity interoperability framework, using a formal process, can make technology ...