Managing your identity

Found Kim Cameron's new blog today, an very interesting read, Kim works for Microsoft and their architect for identity. Kim is the architect of Active Directory and other identity activities, while fairly technical topic they have very significant impacts for HR systems.

In one post Kim talks about the first law of identity "The Owner Decides Law of Identity" Now I am not aware of the background to all the work Kim and others have done in this area however the post struck a cord with me.

Kim also talks about implied and explicit consent over the collection and usage of personal information from employees. Very interesting, while at a basic level I think all solutions in the marketplace cover these items, however if we extrapolate Kim and others thoughts things become very interesting. How do HRIS systems help facilitate the control over an employees identity, should we?

What do I mean. Imagine a world as described by Apple in their Knowledge Navigator (video link via Jeremy Zawodny) a lot of the underlying information needed to provide these environments will come from HRIS systems.

For example, many IT folks believe that IT systems such as LDAP are the basis of this information, here I disagree. HRIS is the master source and should be used to populate LDAP etc. HR are the first people in the organisation to begin data collection and as such should be the master.

This means long term we have some serious things to consider.

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