Making a case for Living Context in identity resolution
by John Ripley
Chief Software Architect, Infoglide Software
I found some thoughts on persistent context recently shared by Jeff Jonas intriguing and agree that context preservation is an important part of identity resolution. However, that’s only part of the solution. Efficiently and effectively analyzing who’s who and who knows whom without maintaining a persistent context in itself is challenging, but compounding the problem further is the reality that today’s solutions must also consider dynamic and disparate data stores such as:
- departmental data silos
- data available only through web services (e.g., SOA services that are searched selectively)
- information from the semantic web
- public data records (e.g., compliance sources)
- external data vendors (e.g., ChoicePoint, Experian)
- live updates to databases
Selectively combining these rich, dynamic data sources with more static sources creates an even richer, more useful “living context” that continuously evolves. In an increasingly connected and online world, one in which facts are added and updated continuously, systems relying upon those facts absolutely have to handle dynamic and static data equally well.
An important part of this living context is understanding that as data and datasources change so does the context. A living context will evolve and adapt to the data. As part of the living context, existing attributes become irrelevant while others become much more relevant. Relationships and identities must be created, confirmed or refuted based on new intelligence.
While the benefits of living context are attractive, we should think carefully about the impact on individuals. In that way we can ensure that organizations introduce reasonable protections against mistakes that impact people’s lives. Data privacy and security are undeniable individual rights, and the impact of identity resolution can be gradual and sometimes hard to quantify.
Being denied services or fair treatment because of an automated misjudgment has immediate and tangible consequences. Putting the living context into play means that audit trails for automated decisioning and manual adjudication must be provided when redress is requested. The burden then falls to the living context to preserve that snapshot of a moment in time and validate the identity decisioning.
In today’s marketplace, the necessity of knowing who’s who and who knows whom continues to grow. As those grow, so does the need of organizations to access data, whether that data is across the office or across the world. Having a living context allows the solution to evolve and adapt to the ever-changing needs of the organization, and that will help ensure both privacy and security for everyone.
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