NSW to build federated ID management rig for staff, punters The Australian State of New South Wales (NSW) will build a federated identity system – or “Identity Hub” - for its many thousands of staff and also for the State's citizens. Oracle, NTT and consultancies Qubit and Dataweave and will work together on the project. The latter company will project manage and then support the …
“The solution is designed to extend seamlessly out into the public cloud, allowing businesses and citizens accessing government services to be incorporated into the solution,”
Sounds a lot like some hyperbole written by a marketing executive. It's a big state, with a lot of people and what works in Sydney may not work that well in, say, Bogan Gate.
So what exactly is the difference between an 'identity hub' and a 'password manager'?
Single sign-in for all government services? In glod's name, why? How often does an employee of the National Parks & Wildlife Service really need to access the servers of the Council of Law Reporting? Surely they won't have any permissions on that server anyway?
Apart from "funnelling millions of taxpayer dollars to Qubit, NTT, Oracle and Dataweave", can anyone clarify what the business case for this is?
Have worked with one of the consultancies (the one with a Q in it) on an IDM project in the past in my old job. We did all the hardware, software (DSEE, IDM 8.1) in house & they wrote the business rules in an exquisitely painful XML language called "Xpress". The system worked great at first until some politics got in the way and certain changes to the system made that caused it to do some weird things which I will not go into. As no planning was put into supporting the platform with a budget like other production systems the bugs were left in and I ended up supporting the system on my own from then until I resigned. My greatest technical success and my worst career decision to not fight harder for a support contract from the upper management.
To this day, the funky IDM still does its thing, the DSEE is still serving UNIX logins and the move to Microsoft AD stalled where it was when I left. In the right hands, a sensible budget, the DSEE is a fantastic solution and IDM a great product provided you don't have a committee of 20 on it & have people skilled up enough to understand its inner workings when it starts cranking out duplicate accounts or deletes the CEO's because they went on holidays etc...
They'll have a committee of 20. And a budget of several million, most of which will go up noses, into the deserving hands of ladies of the night, and to the building of some damn fine patios.
Any idea that Big Brother could be organised enough to be a long-lasting threat is rapidly dissolving in kafka-sillywalks juice these days.
Nevertheless, when this goes belly-up can I sue them and take ownership of their lives? C'monnnn.....
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