Thanks Axel for highlighting my TEC 2009 talk abstract — you’re much better at publicizing my upcoming speaking plans than I am, something I need to improve upon!

My plans for TEC 2009 are indeed to talk about a Survivalist’s Guide to Identity Management.  In my years working in this space, I can’t help but note that most of the things that companies pay me to unravel are things that a little foresight and planning could have rendered unimportant – often they come down to configuration decisions made arbitrarily in the absence of any guiding principle.  I believe that if you can introduce some simple discipline into IT practices early on in a company lifecycle, you can drastically reduce the complexity, and therefore the cost of automating your processes and applications when the time comes.  My goal is to document that discipline in very simple terms, and then to demonstrate how  a pragmatic IT department can go on to derive benefit from that discipline.

I can’t tell how much I’m looking forward to this presentation – It is a topic very near and dear to my heart, and something I hope to enlarge upon whenever I can, for a long time to come.