Information Cards in Industry Verticals

Kim Cameron,Chief Architect of Identity at Microsoft, writes on his Identity Blog:

The recent European Identity Conference , hosted in Munich by the analyst firm Kuppinger Cole , had great content inspiring an ongoing stream of interesting conversations. Importantly, attendance was up despite the economic climate, an outcome Tim Cole pointed out was predictable since identity technology is so key to efficiency in IT.

One of the people I met in person was James McGovern, well known for his Enterprise Architecture blog. He is on a roll writing about ideas he discussed with a number of us at the conference, starting with this piece on use of Information Cards in industry verticals. James knows a lot about both verticals and identity. He has started a critical conversation, replete with the liminal questions he is known for:

‘Consider a scenario where you are an insurance carrier and you would like to have independent insurance agents leverage CardSpace for SSO. The rationale says that insurance agents have more personally identifiable information on consumers ranging from their financial information such as where they work, how much they earn, where they live, what they own to information about their medical history, etc. When they sell an insurance policy they will even take payment via credit cards. In other words, if there were a scenario where username/passwords should be demolished first, insurance should be at the top of the list.’

A great perception. Scary, even...