Processes of Identity and Access Management

Last Friday our volunteers group met again in Frankfurt for the 9th quarterly meeting.

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.