11: Customer Identity Management

Give high-level guidance on the main issues that a conformant identity management program should seek to address.

Other Information:

A key element of the Guiding Principles is that “Service transformation is done with citizens, businesses, and organizations and not to them”. One of the consequences of this is that an effective identity management strategy needs to give people – whether acting on their own behalf as a citizen, or on behalf of another citizen or of a business – ownership and control of their personal data. Identity management is a key enabler of effective service delivery, yet something with which most governments struggle. At the heart of that struggle is often a failure to put the customer – whether a citizen or a business – at the center of government's thinking about identity. Identity is a complex, and by definition deeply personal, concept. An individual may have multiple, overlapping and partial "identities”, each of which is associated with different rights and permissions, even different addresses. These identities often overlap, but in some cases the individual may want to keep them separate in order to protect privacy. At other times, the individual 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, for reasons described in [TGF-Primer]. A wide range of agencies, standards bodies and advocacy groups are deeply involved in many aspects of the work needed to resolve these problems, from technical models for privacy management (such as the OASIS [PMRM]) through to the business, legal and social issues around online identity assurance (such as promoted by [OIX]). It is not the purpose of the Transformational Government Framework to address the details of identity management but rather to give high-level guidance on the main issues that a conformant program should seek to address – based on a set of best practices which is emerging around the world and which we believe represents a way forward for transformational government, which is broadly applicable across a very wide range of governments. Further details about this Identity Management approach are described in [TGF Primer]. No one Government has implemented all features of this approach, but all are being successfully deployed around the world, and together they represent our view of the approach to identity management which will best help deliver Transformational Government. This pattern is important in order to deliver integrated, citizen-centric services as part of a [6] Transformational Business Model and the Franchise Marketplace, as well as to enable the customer-led service innovation envisaged by Customer Empowerment. At a technology level, the approach is underpinned by the SOA-based Technology Development and Management.

Indicator(s):

Indicator:1

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