Common Core Identity Representations
Summit
Objective of Meeting
This meeting was sponsored jointly by the Distributed
Management Task Force (DMTF), the Network
Applications Consortium (NAC), and The
Open Group.
Organizations need to manage the identities of several kinds of people,
including their members or employees, employees of their business
partners, and their customers. These identities are stored in and managed
by software programs. Often, mission-critical components rely on the
identities for their operation.
Organizations also need to manage the identities of items of equipment
of many kinds.
Unfortunately, there are many different ways of representing an
identity. The differences are due partly to different practices in
different organizations and departments, and partly to the adoption by
product manufacturers of different formats.
This means that a large organization has to cope with many different
representations of identity. If the systems that use these representations
are to interoperate, then the organization must provide mappings between
the identity representations. Special products or custom software may be
needed to implement these mappings. The whole process of managing
identities becomes unnecessarily cumbersome and complex.
A common standard way of representing identities would significantly
improve operational efficiency, and would help organizations to comply
with identity and privacy legislation. Joint work by industry bodies and
consortia is needed to achieve this aim.
The aims of the meeting were to:
-
Get consensus and plans for a joint effort to quickly develop a
needs/requirements statement of common core identity representation
problems within the context in which the identities are be used. The
two complementary aspects of the problem are:
- Context: model, attributes, CIM & directory mappings, etc.
- Representation/communications
-
Maximize industry impact by scoping deliverables that will be
used to effectively drive standards-based resolution of defined
problems.
-
Strengthen collaboration between the DMTF, The Open Group, and NAC on
areas of common interest and value.
Summary
Skip Slone opened the meeting and welcomed participants. He outlined
the meeting
purpose and objectives. Fred Wettling then presented the
NAC perspective; Paul Agbabian presented the
DMTF perspective; and Jim Hosmer presented the
requirements discussed in The Open Group.
In a wide-ranging discussion, the meeting reviewed the requirements,
and the proposed solutions, to identify commonality and differences
between the consortia.
It was agreed to use the term identifier rather than identity
or identity representation.
The DMTF, NAC, and The Open Group all agreed that they should work
together to reach conclusion on a common definition of the problem and on
steps towards solving it.
It was also agreed that government participation in the activity would
add value. There was no government representation at the meeting. It was
agreed to seek participation of government representatives.
There is, however, a need to maintain the efficiency of the group. Care
must be taken to keep the active core to a manageable size.
Next Steps
The final deliverables from the work following the meeting should have
the following components:
- The problem(s) to be solved
- Desired future state
- Related standards and standards efforts
- Emerging solutions
- Recommendations
The work products should be:
- Clear and concise
- Based on business needs
- Actionable
- Bounded in scope
- Easily consumable as process input by vendors and standards
organizations
They should form a foundation for enterprise consortium challenges to
vendors and standards organizations, and be useful deliverables to
participating organizations.
It was agreed to hold weekly teleconferences to develop a charter, and
expected that this can be achieved in about a month. The first
teleconference will be at 08:00 PST on Thursday February 3.
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