How much security is enough?

With the increased importance of outsourcing, cyber collaboration, information sharing, and legally binding digital signatures, your partners and clients share your risks and are now key stakeholders in this equation.

Prudent and transparent security is now a cost of doing business. Those that modernize now survive, those that don't, won't.

To modernize efficiently and effectively 1) Find a community that defines cyber security prudence and 2) Adopt enterprise architecture and project management practices to control your modernization initiatives.

Tuesday, April 1, 2008

Clever Ideas at FEAC from Litmus, EDS, and NASA

For those of you who sent in email over the past two months, you knew that I was heads down at the FEAC Institute (http://www.feacinstitute.org/). Many of you may have already learned that FEAC is the cream of the crop for Enterprise Architecture certifications.

While I was attending FEAC, I poured every ounce of time and energy I had into it. The results were bigger and better than I could have ever expected.

At FEAC, Litmus took our identity management expertise and joined up with some great talent from EDS (Paul Kavitz) and NASA (Greg Black) to develop our thesis. Our topic; Leveraging an Identity Management Reference Architecture to get real and consistent results across the entire Federal Enterprise.

I really enjoy getting a bunch of smart folks together in a forum where innovation is acceptable and expected. The results are always amazing. This time was no exception. Our team produced an 80 page thesis which puts a well defined scope and method for modernizing agency identity management capabilities. As it turns out, our "reference architecture" concept also defined (according to our professors) a missing component of the Federal Enterprise Architecture.

So, enterprise architecture met identity management, and some really clever ideas were spawned. The concept of a "reference architecture" is new in the Enterprise Architecture community. As such, it is ripe with opportunity for people to contribute, improve upon the concept, and apply it to the challenge du jour. Our thesis team is putting together a community web site where you can offer up your insights and learn more about reference architectures.

Stay tuned. When the community web site is available, I will post a link on this blog. The FEAC will be publishing our Identity Management thesis soon as well. I will also post a link for this 80 page document as soon as it is up.

Posted by James Ryan