Vendor Relationship Management and Federated Identity

I have failed in my efforts of establishing an approach to federation for my industry vertical...



Recently, I asked a question of the identity bloggers such as Kim Cameron, Ashish Jain, Jackson Shaw, Pat Patterson, Shekhar Jha, Nishant Kaushik, Mike Jones, Johannes Ernst, Gerry Gebel on best practices for starting a federation targeted at the P&C insurance vertical and got varying responses but none of them seemed to be fruitful.

The best answer is to not turn someone asking a question into a sales lead nor to point you towards membership in the Liberty Alliance but instead to figure out how to encourage vendors to do their part in enabling federation.

Let's face it, if I have federation capability from say McGovern Software, then what I really need is to be introduced to enterprise architects in the P&C insurance vertical that also have federation capability from other vendors.

Federation by definition doesn't have the NDA constraints, so vendors can't really use this as an excuse. After all, I can't really have a strategy to create a federation while keeping it secret within my enterprise.

So, how can federation grow if vendors want to insulate their clients from knowing about others that also share the same challenges...

Enterprise Architecture: Business/IT Alignment

Business/IT alignment isn't a stealth word for telling IT to play catch up. It is all about shared values, goals, motivation and innovation...

Are blogs of enterprisey architects confusing?

Pat Patterson and other bloggers sometimes struggle to understand the questions asked by the enterprise crowd and I wanted to chime in and provide insight as to why questions are sometimes asked in a certain way.

Most folks who are employed by large enterprises are governed by media relations policies that barely allow them to even mention to their spouses what company employs them. One thing that is common is that you generally can't say anything good or bad about a particular vendor as avoiding an endorsement is the common practice.

This results in enterprise architects using patterns such as name dropping. For example, whenever I talk about static analysis, I will always mention at least three vendors such as Ounce Labs, Fortify Software and Coverity so as to not sound like an endorsement of any particular tool.

Another pattern we use is to make certain discussions more transparent. So, before you become a vendor, you will know exactly what is important to us and will hopefully move your product to the place we desire or at least fine tweak your thinly-veiled dog-and-pony show to at least sound like you are.

Sometimes questions are asked even when the answer is known. For example, on LinkedIn, I asked how many software vendors have ever appeared in a Gartner Magic Quadrant without paying for it. The dialog around this causes insights above and beyond the additional question.

Anyway, if you are confused by any posting in the blogosphere by an enterprisey architect, don't assume ignorance as everything happens for a reason. Instead, consider probing at any assertion and turning it into a dialog...