Virtual Corporate Business Cards

Martin Kuppinger is one of the key analysts behind the amazing European Identity Conference just held in Munich.  This was “User Centric Meets Enterprise Identity Management” with a twist: our European colleagues have many things to contribute to the discussion about how they fit together…

For a taste of what I'm talking about, here is a posting that I found dazzling.  There are no weeds encumbering Martin's thinking.  He's got the story:  Virtual Corporate Business Cards.   

Yes, I know – it is a little redundant talking about “corporate” and “business” in the context of virtual cards. But it is one of the most obvious, interesting and feasible business cases around Identity 2.0.

What do I mean by that term? My idea is about applying the ideas of Identity 2.0 and especially of InfoCard to the business. Provide every employee with an InfoCard or even some of them and you are better suited to solve many of today’s open issues.

How to issue these cards

I have this in mind for a pretty long time. I remember that I had asked Don Schmidt from Microsoft about the interface between Active Directory and CardSpace some time before EIC 2007. Active Directory might be one source of these cards. Just provide an interface between AD and an Identity Provider for InfoCards and you are able to issue and manage these cards based on information which still exits in the Active Directory. For sure, any other corporate directory or meta directory might work as well.

Today these technical interfaces are still missing, at least in an easy-to-use implementations. But it won’t take that long until we will see them. Thus, it is time to start thinking about the use cases.

How to use these cards

There are at least three types of cards I have in mind:

  • Virtual business cards: They are used when someone represents his company. How do you ensure today that every employee provides current and correct information when he registers with other web sites? How do you ensure that he acts in the web like you expect him to do? How do you ensure that he enters the correct title or the correct information about the size of your business when registering? InfoCards are the counterpart to your paper-based business cards today, but they can contain more information. And there might be different ones for different purposes.
  • Virtual corporate cards: They are used for B2B transactions and interactions. Add information like business roles to the cards and you can provide all these claims or assertions which are required for B2B business. These cards can be an important element in Federation, providing current information on the role of an employee or other data required. For sure there can be as well several cards, depending on the details which are required for interaction with different types of business partners.
  • Virtual employee cards: They are used internally, for example to identify users in business processes. Again, there might be a lot of information on them, like current business roles. You might use them as well to improve internal order processes, identifying the users who request new PCs, paper, or what ever else.

With these three types I might even have to extend the name for the cards, I assume. But I will stick with the term I have in the title of this post. The interesting aspect is the flexibility which (managed) InfoCards provide and the ability to manage them in context with a leading directory you have.

Due to the fact that you are the Identity Provider when applying these concepts you can ensure that no one uses these cards after leaving the company. You can ensure as well that the data is always up-to-date. That’s by far easier than with some of today’s equivalents for these future type of cards.

I will blog these days about two other ideas I have in mind in this context: The way the concept of claims Microsoft’s Kim Cameron is evangelizing will affect end-to-end security in business processes and SOA applications in general and the idea of using InfoCards for all these personalization and profiling ideas which have been discussed many years ago. I’m convinced that Identity 2.0 concepts like InfoCards and claims are a key element to solve these threats and bring these things to live.

There is a lot of business value in these concepts. And they will affect the way businesses cooperate, because they are much easier to implement and use than many other approaches.

I'm with you 100% Martin.  That's the most concise and comprehensible description of enterprise Information Cards that I've seen.  

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Kim Cameron

Work on identity.