In article one and two I made the case for identity-management (IdM) and how an IdM solution can address the everyday problems experienced in organisations. In this article I’m bringing things back to reality and I’ll be highlighting the aspects that could cause your IdM project to overrun and underdeliver. Firstly, technology is only 20% […]
Alwyn Van Niekerk
Alwyn Van Niekerk is a systems architect currently specialising in identity and access management, having written, designed, and architected many large-scale enterprise Java systems. He has a keen interest in Linux and OSS and the current next-generation game-console war, and frequently heads to the countryside with his wife on their motorcycles to forget completely about all of the above ...
Posted inGeneral
The identity-management solution
In my first article I described the requirement for an identity-management (IdM) solution. In this article I will highlight some of the ways in which a properly implemented IdM solution can meet those requirements. One of the very first deliverables in an IdM project is to establish the single view of an identity. Your IdM […]
Posted inGeneral
The case for identity management
Identity management (IdM) has become a buzz phrase in the industry surrounded by more confusion than facts and experience. So what exactly is an identity and why do we need to manage it? An identity consists of attributes describing a person — typically name, surname, ID number, email address, etc. IdM concerns itself with the […]
Posted inLifestyle, Tech
Is technology manipulating consumer behaviour?
The advent of armchair shopping has turned the consumer space completely on its head. Traditionally the capacity to store and move goods hampered the rate of consumption, which ultimately gave birth to larger brick and mortar stores and faster courier services in an attempt to present and sell the ever-growing selection of goods to the […]
Posted inLifestyle, Tech
Spending online, safely
Personally I think online shopping is one of the more valuable additions the internet has made to my life. I don’t always like shopping malls, and I absolutely hate not finding a specific product I’m looking for, never mind finally tracking down that product only to arrive at a store with depleted stock levels. Thankfully […]
Posted inTech
The paradox of technology
“Advancement” and “technology” are words typically mentioned in the same breath, and in most situations technology has made our everyday lives much easier — no more standing in queues in banks, no more taking cheques to people for payment and no more expensive phone bills to communicate internationally. People tend to forget, though — or […]
Posted inTech
Social sites fuel identity theft
The old adage goes that people love to talk about themselves, and nowhere is this more evident than on the popular Web 2.0 sites such as Facebook, Flickr, Twitter and MySpace. All of a sudden you have the ability to follow strangers’ everyday moves, see in great detail where they have been, and read all […]
Posted inLifestyle, Tech
Simplifying the rat race through technology
Most of us live in it, and most of us hate it, no doubt about, but the rat race is an inevitable phase of life for anybody interested in advancing their career and “becoming somebody”. The truth is that the rat race is bad for all of us. It’s not necessarily just the negative aspect […]
Posted inBusiness, Tech
Managing your identity
People through the ages have always had a requirement to prove in a credible and trustworthy manner that they are indeed who they say they are. Given the power that comes with a person authenticating their identity, it follows naturally that the art of identity fraud has become prevalent in areas where a lot of […]
Posted inTech
The joys of code optimisation
Last Friday I had the joy of going live with code that improved the execution time of an existing piece of code by 422%, and moved it from a batch process (which took more than 30 minutes to run, and only ran three times per day) to an online real-time process, thereby enabling users a […]