What I couldn’t fit into 140 characters

I tweeted this week a point which I thought was important:

There’s a threat to cloud computing in the form of value add thick client service management (horizontal integration) eg ID management

Ben, and Mike responded, but I couldn’t seem to get my point across and trying to explain a view on the future of IT in under 140 characters is a challenge. So for the first time in a long time I have reverted to long form communication on the internet.

Welcome to my first real blog post for nearly a year. Here goes.

The number of services delivered via the web is increasing and this isn’t just an increase in the number of new web only services such as email or twitter but is also driven by services that are migrating onto the web from traditional channels such as invoices and account management features of suppliers like telecommunication, power and, dare I say it, even tax.

The motivations behind this channel shift on the side of businesses supplying these services is cost reduction – but there are a number of issues that need to be resolved, and the ramification of these decisions will have far reaching consequences for the future of the internet.

The cost versus the benefit

There are a couple of basic strategies to go about getting people to switch from costly channels such as mail or telephony to the cheaper web channel. The most inelegant strat is to not give them any choice, force them to make the shift, but I think this strategy misses the whole spirit of the web, so we won’t consider this as an option.

For individuals the decision to switch services from traditional channels to the web is a simple equation of cost v benefit. I call this the use cost and the use benefit equation.

• Use costs include all the things that prevent people from changing channel such as familiarity and comfort with the web, access to high speed internet connection and any relevant process inertia.
• Use benefits include all the things that encourage people to use the web channel and include such things as ease of use, a decrease in the time it takes to do tasks and any financial benefits that could be available.

Increasing the uptake of online services can be achieved by either increasing the use benefit or decreasing the use cost for the web channel. This simple picture is complicated by the cost v benefit equation being a subjective test that is different for each person individually.

Let’s imagine for a second we work at a large organisation which includes every citizen of the country as customers. We need to think about how we can either increase the benefit or decreasing the cost for customers to switch channels.

Reducing the use cost is about making the online channel easier to use than other channels. There is always going to be a base level of use cost online particularly the question of identity management as managing username and passwords can be a problem for some people.

Increasing the use value begins by looking at what customers value and a good place to start is with time. Nearly everyone is time poor and giving time to customers has been particularly successful for some organisations, particularly banks.

As more and more services work there way through this process and begin to service customers through the lower cost web channel identity management becomes a problem and for some organisations who may only service customers infrequently the use cost of managing identification may always outweigh any use value for their customers.

Solutions create themselves

There are two general solutions to this problem of insufficient use value for some services.

Horizontal online service integration
The first involves the integration of services at the service provider’s end so that a single username and password can be used for a number of different services. The Government Logon Service in New Zealand is a good example of this strategy in action.

It would be great to see private companies look at horizontal integration and public and private sector partnerships would be the icing on the cake here.

Local identity management
This solution would come about if organisations don’t deal with the problem through service integration and it becomes necessary for users to reduce the use costs themselves. This would create an opportunity for identity management to be provided by software developers most ominously by a particular operating system developer based in Redmond, WA who already have a near monopoly in their market.

This is the point of my tweet, cloud computing could be threatened by local identity management systems and we should be mindful of the implications of our actions in this area.

ISO have a working draft looking at providing a framework of standards for identity management (ISO/IEC CD 24760) this year and everything is up for grabs. What the standards will mean for identity management and how those affect the future remains uncertain. Significantly there is the possibility that this issue could be resolved in different ways in different countries, which will challenge the global nature of the web.