Our GenericIAM group offers a diploma thesis, which is sponsored by NIFIS e.V. and supported by impulsIT and the Chair of M-Business and Multilateral Security (Frankfurt University).

The topic is: “Prozessanalyse im Bereich der Enterprise Identity Management Systeme – Analyse, Ableitung und Entwicklung einer Prozesslandkarte.”

Detailes about conditions and objectives were descriped on the homepage (in German) .

After a short introduction and welcome to our new members, the working groups reported their progress.
As modelling is our key activity, the modelling approach was debated intensively.
From start it was the main intention to collect all existing models and implemented enterprise processes trying to factor out a generic process layer. This bottom-up approach turned out to be not easy and offered some pit-falls.
In order to complement this approach and to create a more general “birds eye” view the group started modelling following a top down method.
Each method has its merits and its disadvantage:

• While the bottom-up way always maintains a solid foothold on proven real-world implementations it can on the other hand lead to arbitrary results in terms of naming folklore and physical artefacts.
• The top-down path however starts from a clear conceptual set of definitions and derives its conceptual framework by stepwise simple but compelling refinements. Especially due to its use of coloured Petri Nets it is however blamed for its theoretical approach; virtually incomprehensible for practitioners.

Both approaches are in fact meant to meet at common ground somewhere in the middle – on the “generic layer”. We hence expect to take the best of both worlds.
And the result has to be shown to the world. We hope to be able to do so at the 2nd European Identity Conference, starting April 22nd in Munich. You are welcome to visit us at our both there. – See you in April.

Same as last year we have a nice and beautiful booth on the second European Identity Conference 2008, in Munich (Germany). The booth is thankfully sponsored by the German NIFIS and KuppingerCole.
For more information take a look at http://www.id-conf.com

The location will be:

Museumsinsel 1 • 80538 München, Germany
Phone: +49 (0)89211 25170
Fax: + 49 (0)89211 25165
http://www.forumamdeutschenmuseum.de

For that purpose we created shapes for Visio 2000/2002/2003 and 2007. From the IAM-Wiki an following links you can download the shapes and find some useful information to use it.

• http://www.iam-wiki.org/EPK
• http://www.iam-wiki.org/EPK_Modellierung
• http://www.iam-wiki.org/Prozessorientiertes_Identity_Management
• http://blog.doubleslash.de/2007/10/12/visio-2007-shapes-zur-prozessmodellierung
• http://blog.doubleslash.de/2007/03/01/vorlage-und-shapes-zur-prozessmodellierung-mit-visio

The location will be NIFIS e.V.
Hanauer Landstraße 300
Frankfurt am Main
Germany
Phone: +49 69 40809370
Fax: +49 69 40147159
Internet: http://www.nifis.de

1. When do we need Identity Management?
2. Which risks do we have today?
3. How mature are the others?
4. Why couldn´t we wait to the time we urgently need it?
5. What is different in IAM-projects?
6. What are the most common mistakes in IAM-projects?
7. Which objectives could we support ?
8. What is the most cost effectiv way for a solution?
9. Who supports the CIO?
10. What doubleSlash can do?

By the way: Corbin H. Links wrote a great post about the "Strategic System Idealism and Legacy Reality".

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The location will be NIFIS e.V.
Hanauer Landstraße 300
Frankfurt am Main
Germany
Phone: +49 69 40809370
Fax: +49 69 40147159
Internet: http://www.nifis.de

Well “that’s real life” we are tempted to say … but wait a minute! Can this really be true? I remember a second quotation from the same event “Roles are the DNA of an organisation” stated Ron Rymon, the founder of the role engineering firm Eurekify.

O.k. if you consider any commercial endeavour as a mild form of sparsely ordered chaos, if you run a company merely ad hoc and a role model is considered as an unnecessarily rigid structure imposed on top of a fluid ecosystem, that reinvents itself at every very moment – ok, in this case forget about role models.

But what, when it comes to automation? Many, if not most, enterprises are now strained by global competition. A manufacturer in Pittsburgh or Gelsenkirchen may compete with one in Chongqing (重庆) or Poona where at least the labour cost are dramatically lower. One can imagine that besides dirty political tricks it may take some bit of innovation and automation to succeed in this battle field.

But what is automation? In order to automate an organisation you need to express it in a formal way so that it can be processed by machines or - more often - in a blended fashion by machines and humans. You need to formally document your policies & rules, processes and roles in a complete, consistent and machine readable way. Only then they can be repeatedly applied by those above mentioned processors.

Considering this scenario, how can the organisation have changed while the role model is still controversially discussed? No way! The roles are the organisation, or at least an important part of it.