1.5.2: Identity Management
Document best practices for identity management. Other Information:
Citizen-centric identity management - Identity management is a key enabler, yet something with which most governments struggle.
At the heart of that struggle is often a failure to put the citizen at the centre of government's thinking about identity.
Identity is a complex, and by definition deeply personal, concept. As Figure 7 opposite illustrates, a single citizen in fact
has multiple, overlapping "identities". Each identity may be associated with different rights and permissions, even different
addresses. These identities overlap, but in some cases the citizen may want to keep them separate in order to protect his
or her privacy. At other times, the citizen may want them to be joined up, and be frustrated at constantly having to furnish
government with the same information over and over again. Governments have often struggled to manage this complexity. Typically,
identity is defined separately in relation to each silo-based government service. Even countries which have traditionally
had the simplicity of a single citizen identifier (such as Finland, where there has been a single population register since
1634), have tended to build up separate and inconsistent business processes for identity verification. And although the advent
of e-Government held out the promise of significant simplification of identity management - bringing service improvement gains
for the citizen and efficiency savings for the government - in practice there remain significant barriers. Many of the tools
which governments have put in place to guarantee security in the online world (passwords, PINs, digital signatures etc), have
in practice acted as barriers to take-up of online services. And attempts to join up databases to enable cross-government
efficiencies and service improvements have often been met with mistrust and suspicion by citizens. Increasingly, however,
a set of best practices is emerging around the world which we believe represents a way forward for citizen service transformation,
which is broadly applicable across a very wide range of governments.
Indicator(s):
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