Panacea
25 Mar 2008
Many years ago I've seen an old woman on a big flea market in a little Polish town. She was selling some kind of potion and she was announcing "It can heal all the diseases in the world - except for stupidity".
Recently I've been trying to catch up on a blogsphere after yet another long absence. I've seen that the trend to oversell partial solutions is much stronger than a few months ago. I just want to make something clear:
- No "Identity Technology" by itself can heal your enterprise of problems that were being swept under the carpet for too long. These problems have to be dealt with, no matter what magical technology use use. I'm talking about chaos in organizational structure, roles and entitlements, incompatible information systems, inconsistent and unreliable data that are corrected on the fly by manual processes, etc. Admit that you have these problems and do not expect (or pretend) that a deployment of some software product will make them disappear.
- No "User-Centric Identity" will magically turn the Internet into a better and more secure place where the privacy of the people is honored. No. Technology can seldom do that. Only a proper business motivation and legislation can help to achieve that. But even that cannot solve it completely. World is not a kind place. Get over it.
- No "Web Service Technology" can make everyone cooperate. All the technologies that dance around SOAP are not that new. There is not much improvement over CORBA, Sun-RPC and many other similar technologies. Only standardization and interoperability effort can help, not the technology per se.
What you should do is to think for a while what you really need. And try to think about the solution that you want without all the marketing nonsense. Think about the architecture first. And only then go down to individual technologies. As the wold is far from perfect you will need to adapt your ideas and you architecture to the technologies that are available. But always keep in mind your original goal.
The problem of most of the technological companies is that their goal is to make profit, not to solve your problems. The goal is set by marketing department, not by technologists. And that's natural. They are commercial companies. Therefore you must be the navigator and keep your direction. And be strong.
Think about the Architecture ... and avoid buying magic potions that claim to heal all the diseases in the world - they will not heal stupidity.