Editor’s Note

Heather Flanagan, Principal Editor, IDPro - © 2020 IDPro

It takes a village—or, in our case, a global industry of IAM Practitioners—to create a new Body of Knowledge (BoK). This first collection of articles is brought to you by individuals from around the globe, including Europe, Australasia, and the Americas. Without their engagement, we would not have been able to bootstrap this collection.

This first issue of the IDPro Body of Knowledge offers an orientation for the identity practitioner to some of the subject matter frequently encountered in organizations.  We start this collection with an Introduction to Identity – Part 1: Admin-time, brought to us by Ian Glazer and edited by Espen Bago. From there, we look at the world of Identifiers and Usernames, another excellent article by Ian Glazer. Three articles focus on how legal systems impact IAM: Laws Governing Identity Systems by Thomas Smedinghoff, Introduction to the GDPR by Andrew Cormack, and Impact of GDPR on Identity and Access Management by Andrew Hindle.

Standards have a big impact on the IAM space, and Corey Scholefield offers a review of ISO/IEC 24760:2019 – Part 1. Project management styles also have a big impact on IAM, and we have an Introduction to Project Management for IAM Projects from Graham Williamson and Corey Scholefield.

We wrap up this issue with a short list of Independent IAM Organizations, organized by Mark Drummond, which introduces the reader to some of the organizations that coordinate and support various aspects of IAM around the world.

Readers are encouraged to offer feedback via our GitHub repository ( https://github.com/IDPros ). All articles will have a copy published in the ‘bok’ repository so people can offer feedback, corrections, or requests for more information.

This is only the first issue; future releases of the BoK will extend beyond these concepts to provide other interesting perspectives and introduce new topics, such as the identities of things, IAM in the Workforce as opposed to IAM from the consumer perspective, and new standards including Verifiable Credentials and Decentralized Identity.  The IDPro BoK will remain a collaborative effort and we welcome your suggestions on what should change in the introduction as well as the other articles. We particularly encourage engagement—authoring, reviewing, participating on the BoK Committee—from a more diverse set of individuals. There are so many people across all races, genders, and cultures out there with the varied experience and ideas that we need to see in the BoK; please participate!

Thank you for your support as we create the Body of Knowledge that our industry so desperately needs! I hope you will continue to engage with IDPro and consider writing an article yourself for a future issue!