Give me Liberty or give me, ... SAML?

Management is growing strange this days, asking for employees to come up with solutions for problems that cost less money but, for the other hand, not wanting to actually change anything.

My new Boss (new as my boss but, we worked together in the first time I worked in PT) just made me a recommendation in Linkedin. Like all my recommendations (and all that I've made), I never wrote myself the text to someone else to publish. The way I see it, when you're speaking about someone, what you say also says something about yourself so, if you highly recommend a brain dead or poorly recommend someone brilliant, you're also presenting who you are to the world.

I must say that his recommendation was pretty good, “one of the most gifted”, “ideas well built” and “focused on solving problems” are some off the expressions he uses but, he also called me rigid. Now, that's a down side, isn't it? So, the most obvious question is how can I overcome this particular side of my, … err, … personality.

I'll give here an example of a real situation where I was "rigid" because I spoke against the trendy decision and didn't look for ways to accommodate what I thought it was a foolish decision (note: I had no vested interest in either way so, the only thing I was about to gain was the pleasure of seeing others do something good).  

The most recent point of contention was about an identity project called PT-ID. That's a project who's main goal is to unify the logins of customers in the PT group of companies.

Throughout it's history, PT has been buying and selling, creating and closing companies as dictated by the management trend of the year to consolidate to better focus on their core business or diversify. That results in a good number of obvious problems that need to be addressed by it's IT. Identity Management is, of course, one of them.

So, being IdM a dear subject to me, I tried to know more about this PT-ID project. When I found out that, they were taking this from the backend side, trying to unify the logins of the customers, I felt like on a trip to the past, a wrong, without value and one that I had hope it was dead past.

As soon as the PT management thinks about buying a new company, this project (assuming it's already completed) will break due to the need of creating an PT-ID v2 to unify this new company with everything else or, if the company is small enough not to warrant this kind of expense, we will end up with 2 ID repositories, the unified one and “the other”.

If the management decides to sell one of the companies, then it will be even worst. We either sell the company without it's customers database (and, if you like this deal, I have an almost new car that you might be interested in) or we let the new owners to take away a database with all the customers of all the companies in the group.

We crossed this bridge in the 90's. We realized this was a lose – lose situation where the IT was drastically reducing the value of a business opportunity (selling a company) and was opening a company into a good number of lawsuits and bad publicity because of the way it handles it's customers data.

It was with this problems in mind that we (the industry) started to create the Federation Standards as a way to develop and delivery crossed services without exchange of personal customer data. A way for IT to act as a business enabler instead of an constrain in what the business side wants to do to better one's organization.

PT needs to start to build cross services between different companies inside the group (and, why not expand it to the outside) but, it needs to do this in a way that's scalable, both from the IT point of view (more users, more transactions per second) and business (other companies, more services in the federation network). It needs to start moving to channel independence where all customers are treated equally, either from a computer, a cell phone, a tablet or the device of tomorrow.

In a world of Big data, this small boy mentality, from a small town that uses small words can't keep up. And this isn't a step in the right direction.