Preface
In late 2000, Governor Michael Leavitt of Utah asked me to serve as his CIO and a member of his cabinet. Governor Leavitt had a strong belief in the power of e-government to transform government operations and thought that my private-sector experience as CTO for an early e-commerce start-up, http://iMall.com, and then as vice president of product development at Excite@Home was just what was needed to help build e-government in Utah.
I spent almost two years working on that vision and building an infrastructure to support it. While I was CIO, I struggled to learn how to build flexible, interoperable infrastructure in a large, loosely coupled organization. Many of the issues we faced, such as privacy, naming, directories, authentication, and digital signatures, were identity issues. Many more of them were about how to execute an enterprise strategy in a decentralized organization. State governments are not alone in those challenges.
I have a deep respect for the power of digital identity, and I am convinced by my experiences in e-commerce and as CIO that digital identity was a foundational element in modern IT systems. I can't imagine an agile, business-responsive IT infrastructure that doesn't have at its core a flexible, interoperable identity infrastructure.
Not long ago, Doug Kaye sent an email to a group of folks that said, essentially: "The world needs a book on digital identity. Would any of you like to write it?" I thought that sounded fun, and this book is a direct result ...