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Identity Management

Common Core Identity Representations Summit

Introduction

Participants

Agenda

Discussion

New Actions Raised

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Common Core Identity Representations Summit

The meeting was held at San Francisco on 25 January 2005. It was chaired by Skip Slone. Chris Harding took the minutes.

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 un-necessarily 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.

Purpose of Meeting

The aims of the meeting were to:

• Get consensus and plans for joint effort to quickly develop a needs / requirement 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:

  1. Context: model, attributes, CIM & directory mappings, etc.
  2. Representation / communications.

• Maximize industry impact by scoping deliverables that will be used to effectively drive standards-based resolution of defined problems.

• Strengthen collaboration between DMTF, Open Group, and NAC on areas of common interest & value.

Deliverables

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; and
• Recommendations.

The work products should be:

• Clear and concise;
• Based on business needs;
• Actionable;
• Bounded in scope; and
• 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.

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