I/AM moves up from 6 to 5, alright pop pickers? Not 'arf

[Title for Alan Freeman fans.]

Via a tweet from @chrisb (of the JISC) I note that Educause have published the results of their survey of the Top-Ten IT Issues, 2010 (for US HE institutions).

I/AM (identity and access management) has moved up from number 6 to number 5, about which the report says:

Critical questions for Identity/Access Management include the following:

1. What is the institution's documented process for verifying the identity of individuals and linking physical and electronic identities?
2. What standards, trust systems, or existing federations (e.g., InCommon) can be used to ensure that an institution can trust another institution's electronic identities?
3. Are I/AM policies and processes adaptable and flexible to allow for changes in roles and access rights over time?
4. How should institutions strike the balance between carefully managing identity and access and utilizing broadly distributed networked resources?
5. Do current I/AM strategies account for federation and single sign-on with third-party hosted and cloud-based applications?
6. How can institutions create stronger linkages between physical and electronic identities?

(Note: the bullet points were not numbered in the original.)

I think the JISC's work on the UK Access Management Federation has done much to help with these kinds of issues in the UK, so I wonder if the critical questions in the UK might be somewhat different?  For example, number 2 would probably focus more heavily on issues around inter-federation trust (i.e. trust between institutions in the UK and those elsewhere).

Numbers 3 and 4 are interesting and I expect that these kinds of issues will be touched on during next week's Where next for resource licensing? event, organised jointly by JIBS and Eduserv and from which I hope to live-blog on eFoundations LiveWire.  The explicit cross-over between resource licensing and access management seems to feature fairly low in our discussion priorities (at least as far as I'm aware) though it is clearly a topic of interest to Eduserv, since we offer services in both spaces (Licence Negotiation and Access and Identity Management).

I suspect that number 5 is of interest to us all and, for information, we have a bit of work bubbling under here at the moment to link together OpenAthens with Google Apps, though I'm not sure if there's anything more public that I can share with you yet.

Number 6 looks interesting, though I'm slightly bemused by what it actually means.

Comments

[Dorothea Salo]

Perhaps #6 translates to "eliminate login swapping/sharing"?