It seems like we have been confusing the establishment of trust in an online environment with identity management for quite some time now. We have a keen intuitive sense for what it means to establish trust in "face-to-face" service delivery environments (e.g. I am a long time customer of my bank and thus I am a valued and trusted customer) but this seems to be missing in the context of online service delivery. We seem to have very narrow focus on the authentication problem in the online service environment - lots of time and energy has been spent on understanding various types of "multi-factor" authentication techniques but very little effort seems to have gone into explaining how this will enrich the service delivery experience for the customer.
I would like to suggest that the answer lies in the vast amounts of data being collected by our servers as our customers conduct business with us over the Internet or the phone. It's time we began to think about a trust rating - an analogue of a credit rating if you will, but one that measures the trust quotient of the entity we are transacting with. This will enable us to customise the delivery of an online service to temper the risk inherent in the transaction with the trust that has been engendered by the good behaviour of the entity.
First posted on Sunday, June 25, 2006 at 08:58PM
1 comment:
So its been a year or so since I wrote this, my first blog entry. Much has happened since then, including my rather stunned realisation that the term Identity Management has been largely restricted to the notion of managing the people who work for an organisation. Customers aren't included in this problem in general ... but access management most certainly is. It seems like the main motivation for managing Identities is for managing Access - further reinforcing my opinion that Trust needs to play a larger part in the solution ...
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