A good conversation yesterday after my blog posting that threw up some interesting conclusions. Whilst the focus for our web presence is likely to be on new business generation (which is unsurprising, given the type of business we are in), and a much stronger focus on social networking going forward, the other area that we need to provide structure for is services that are provided to live clients.
At the moment this latter area is fairly undeveloped – extranet and file sharing services, and web conferencing. However it is easy to see that even a mid-sized organisation like ours is likely to see a proliferation of web-based services from finance, project delivery and so on.
Having a consistent look and feel to those services would be nice, but unlikely to be cost effective if the services are provided by multiple third parties. However having consistent identity management will be much more important to provide a coherent client experience. It is amazing, however, that the web has developed this far and yet we still don't have a reliable, single source of identity that can help organisations like mine not have top reinvent the wheel (again).
Think of many logins you have online. I have lost count. Now imagine a world where you just used one set of credentials…
The barriers? It seems to me that they are twofold. The first is that there is competition in this space from companies (Microsoft, Google and so on) where identity isn't their primary product… Microsoft use Live ID as a way to authenticate you against their other services, which means that competitor service providers wouldn't use it themselves.
The second is around issues of privacy, and a seeming built-in resistance to giving details of identity to one organisation that exists in the internet technical community. Ironically this leads to the situation we have today where you have to trust personal identity information to many, many organisations, and can never really be sure that anyone on the internet is who they say they are.
Writing this I have realised that, whilst a passionate dissenter to the concept of ID cards, I do strongly believe that we need an online equivalent. How contrary…
mmitII 
What about OpenID? An easy and ideal way to manage your online identity, and 'authenticate' your presence.
Also, there have been various startups for the last decade trying to get traction as one-stop ID/passports – OAUTH protocol using Twitter and Facebook Connect seem to be the current ways forward (although I steer clear of Facebook because of constantly changing T&Cs and 'evil' use of personal data).
I actually use 1Password on the Mac to automatically manage and create passwords for sites all in one place, I only have to use one masterpassword to manage them all. Fantastic tool, give it a try.
OpenID and OAUTH are definitely the way forward – I guess it's just that neither seem to have strong traction (especially into the corporate world). Big companies still are wedded to the idea of managing their employees identity, and struggle to get their heads around the idea that an individual can have an identity outside of the company…