Editor’s Note

Heather Flanagan, Principal Editor, IDPro

© 2020 IDPro

As I write, this week kicks off Identiverse 2020 – an eight-week extravaganza of online sessions on every aspect of digital, free to the world. Perhaps even more fun than the sessions themselves are the conversations happening after each session, sometimes on Twitter, other times on a Slack channel. Which is great, but how does that relate to the Body of Knowledge? Because in several of those conversations, I’ve seen, “This should be in the BoK!”

They’re right. It should all be in the IDPro Body of Knowledge. We as identity practitioners have so much knowledge that we want to share. As fabulous as Identiverse is every year, we need to think about how to turn the ephemeral sessions into a concrete body of material that will inform practitioners at every stage of their professional development.

With Issue 2 of the BoK, we’re adding more information for practitioners to come to a common understanding of terminology and practices. We start with a short review of how access management has evolved from the early days of identity, thanks to Pamela Dingle and her “Introduction to Identity – Part 2: Access Management.” We continue on the theme of access with an “Introduction to Access Control” by André Koot. Conversations regarding digital identity inevitably lead to discussions on privacy, and so we kick off the topic of privacy in the BoK with Clare Nelson's highly interesting read on “Introduction to Privacy and Compliance for Consumers."

For those of you drawn to the standards space, we offer a review of parts 2 and 3 of the ISO/IEC 27460 “IT Security and Privacy - A framework for identity management”. And if IAM architecture is more your focus, then “Introduction to IAM Architecture” by Andrew Cameron and Graham Williamson provides a solid grounding in the subject.

The IAM field is at a point where there is so much demand for what we do – everything is moving online, remote participation is the norm, not the exception – and we must take that energy and get our house in order. We need to have a common language and an understanding of the use cases that drive our architectures, our standards, and our policies. Let’s get our knowledge written down so we can make strategic decisions on our industry’s future.

With many thanks to the authors and reviewers of the BoK,

Heather Flanagan

Principal Editor, IDPro