Oh, How the Identity Industry Has Changed!

Well, this is more people than I expected this morning. Thank you for getting up after, I'm sure, a very intense week of conferencing and I'm hoping you're gonna take back everything that you learned. You'll remember all of it, all of it when you go back home, cuz I really do love how our industry comes together for this kind of thing where we, you know, share our knowledge, discuss all the interesting trends in the space, and make some plans for the future. And since we're here as identity practitioners, I really wanna talk to you about physicists.

So A bit of a side note, if you're curious about the whole spherical cow thing, it's a, it's a reference to a joke about physicists and there's a link there that you can look up the joke, it's old enough that it has its own Wikipedia entry. But what do physicists do? They take massive amounts of data and they condense it, they summarize it, and they simplify it until it's an estate that they have any hope of making sense of the big picture. And they can spend lifetimes on this.

I mean, Einstein's theories and hypotheses are still being tested 70 years after his death. Now, generally speaking, it becoming a physicist takes about six years plus or minus a few.

First, there's the undergraduate degree where you have to get a bit of a more well-rounded education, and then usually there's your master's degree and then finally the doctoral degree where you're now diving into the specifics of your field. And don't you think it must be nice having all of that formal, structured, intentional training to launch them into a complex industry? And that does kind of put into perspective, doesn't it?

I mean, what we've seen in our industry, because according to the last six ID pro skill surveys, identity practitioners still take years to feel proficient in that field. And given the rate of change in our industry, that timeframe does not appear to be getting any shorter. So the field is constantly evolving, as we all know, and it's taking us a long time to master it, but it's still pretty awesome. I still love what we do. I love working in this industry and I love seeing how things have shifted over time.

What, what I've observed this week, last week, all the conferences over the last two years or so, is we're drifting towards a more user-centric, privacy focused set of solutions. Now that said, how many of you have heard of the ID Pro skill survey? That's not very many, Which means probably that same number of people are the ones that actually have taken the survey.

Well, thank you. Thank you for taking the survey. I hope you'll find this data interesting enough that next year you too will fill out that survey. So let's take a little look. The survey's been going on for six years at this point. So we have a fair amount of data about the industry and what we as practitioners and what our businesses actually think is going on. So first off, one of the, one of the core questions we ask are, you know, well, what skills actually got you to where you are today? And what we've seen is there's really been an evolution in people's feelings on that.

The, for techni, there's technical skills of course, and then there's the, the soft skills, the human skills for the technical skills, systems, architecture and cybersecurity and programming have been in the top three of what everyone thinks is the most important technical skills they could possibly know. Almost since the survey began only, the only, the first survey had a little bit of a difference.

The for the soft skills, however, there's been a little bit more of a, of a spread as in terms of what people think has been most influential for establishing them in their career, lateral thinking and problem solving. Now that one has always been somewhere in the top three since we started, but after that it sort of blends out in ability to work in a team business awareness, adaptability, and oral communication and presentation.

Now, I'm a little surprised at the that last one about the oral communication and presentation because that one was considered really important in the early surveys, and then it wasn't considered important in the middle. And then it was important again at the end. And this is one of those things like, why did that change?

Well, who knows? You know, we could blame the pandemic because we all love to blame the pandemic, but I don't think that the timing actually lines up. So what do you get from this? What you get from this is that understanding the architecture is gonna help you understand where to find efficiencies in your business. And then being able to use some lateral thinking will help you overall solve problems and just help your business succeed. So initially when the survey came out, well, we ask about, well, what are you interested in as an individual? And what is your company interested in?

And those things did not line up. And we said, that's okay, that's fine. Because surely what's about to happen is give it a year or two and we'll see that the individual practitioners are just, they're just ahead of the curve and their, their businesses will follow along. That's not what happened. That's not really until this year, this year is the first year where we've actually had an alignment on what, what do individuals find interesting and what do their enterprises find interesting? You know what, we all care about authentication. That is in everyone's top of the list.

And thank you passkey for all that you've done to, to bring us all together. So we've had, you know, several years of individuals very interested in the personal identity technologies of SSI wallets, verifiable credentials. Absolutely. We also have years of enterprises going, meh, not so much on their radar. Now I have a theory that that might actually change going forward as there are regulations in the space that are starting to say, no, really, you have to care about this. So it possible that this will change in the, in the future.

Of course, you're going to be able to identify as you're asking people, and looking back at all this years of data, you must have a wide variety of opportunities that you can just sink your teeth into. And then you're going to have all the challenges to try and pull your teeth out while you're biting. So on the one hand, our opportunities, you know, there's, there's more. People have digital identities and they want to bring their own, you know, bring your own identity into an environment.

This is something we see pretty frequently in higher education and research, which is more my background for identity solutions. These things are putting people in control of their own identities, which we're all interested in. They're creating new ways for individuals to interact with services and products, including employees, new ways to, to actually engage with some of what their employer is doing. And we are seeing governments pay a lot more attention to data handling and privacy, which I think is, is giving us something to stand on.

It's giving us the ability to say, all right, identity is part of the strategic mission and that that's good cuz that helps us get the resources we need in the company to do things. On the other hand, challenges. So the fact that individuals are like, no, no, we really wanna dive into to ssi, we really wanna get into those personal identity technologies. And when you have all that enthusiasm and are completely unable to tap it, perhaps not the best thing.

Now, we've heard a lot this week that SSI is going to influence the market. Is influence the market, maybe in influencing the market. It kind of depends on what room you were in, how that's gonna go. But we're still certainly talking about it. That churn makes it a little hard to know where to focus efforts. So I consider that a challenge. The other thing I consider a challenge is the fact that we have a global internet. And isn't that marvelous?

Well, human design jurisdictions make life insanely complicated because privacy laws, they're not the same everywhere. And yet people don't stay in their nice little box when they're working.

So that's, that is an interesting challenge too. So that's sort of, you know, just setting the stage for what we're thinking about and what we're looking at from the last few years. But at the moment I also wanna dive into a sort of a sneak preview of, well what did we learn most recently? Because most recently we had the biggest year ever in term of respondents. We had over 400 people actually respond to the survey, which was great. One of the things I am not going to cover is the whole diversity.

You know, how many men, how many women? Identifying as what about the age? I'm not going into demographics. Why? Couple reasons.

One, we only started asking those questions about two years ago or so, and the initial skip rates were really high. People didn't wanna talk about that. You don't need to know how old I am and how I di identify. Thank you very much. We're getting more answers now. People are becoming more comfortable with understanding that you can't manage what you can't measure and we can't improve the diversity if we have no idea where our starting point is. So they're, they're opening up a little bit to that, but not enough that we're willing to say anything about it.

Now you may disagree, you may really be curious about, well what else is in that data? What is she not telling me? Fortunately for you, that data is gonna be publicly available on the ID pro website as are all the last six years. So there's five points I wanna touch on from 2023 that popped up.

Now, one I've talked about quite a bit, which is the whole feelings of proficiency. That's still an issue for us in the most recent survey. People who've been in the industry for a while realize that there's even more they don't know, and the newer participants don't feel proficient either. It's just an interesting curve.

You know, the, the beginner to two year old identity practitioner, they come in and they're like, oh man, this is hard. I, I'm, I'm still new, I don't know anything. But then they graduate into, it's all right, I got this, I understand it, I'm in control. And then at about the seven year mark, they're like, oh no, I don't know anything anymore because they've now identified, you know, all the complexity as they're trying to dive into this space. So thank you, the middle layer of people because you are keeping us from completely giving up and keeping us moving. So that was the first point.

The second point I wanna bring up is, you know, the, in 2023, again, those personal identity technologies, SSI wallets, verifiable credentials, individuals definitely spot on, think they're really, really important. They don't have any experience in them, mind you, but they're really important. And enterprise still not so much. Third point, and this one is, is actually very near and dear to my heart. And that is seeing an interesting shift perhaps of identity as, as plumbing because there's less interest than there has been in standards development.

Maybe that's because there's less net new innovation. Fundamental innovation and more what I would call industrialization, where you've now got the, you've invented the thing, now you have to figure out how to use it. I don't think we should be giving up on standardization. I collect standards, organizations like Pokemon, I've, I've, I participate in many, I have supported many and I still find their mission very critical. But there's an interesting gap growing, which I have some theories on. We can get into that later.

Fourth, there have been some swings in enterprise priorities. Now that one, I think we can go ahead and blame the pandemic because we all wanna blame the pandemic because it was suddenly, everybody is now remote, everything is now online and you've now got a really driving need for MFA and Siam cuz the, the whole digital engagement suddenly became much, much bigger and not just a thing that you do to check off for an audit. It's now like a strategically important thing, mission for your organization to get sorted out.

And the last bit I think you can take from all of that is that adaptability, you have to have it, you have to be able to adapt to the changing circumstances. Heaven's fend, we get into another pandemic, but something's gonna continue changing. One of the points I made yesterday out of paper I wrote, which is a government issued digital credentials and privacy is we are seeing a growing, growing, growing ecosystem of digital identities out in the universe, which gives us a growing and growing attack surface.

You know, as identity becomes infrastructure, it becomes a glorious thing to, to attack in a society. And that's a, a pretty scary thing. So you've gotta adapt to whatever's gonna be happening around you. So this one is also pretty interesting. Now I've got on here the pie chart from 2019 that looks at, okay, how many years of experience do you have in the field? And what you can see comparing that to the most recent year is that people are leaving. They're hopefully retire.

Hopefully, I'm going to say they're retiring, that's why they're leaving. But in 20 19, 60 8% had 10 years of experience or more. Most recently 45%. Hmm. Organizations really need to start prior, if they haven't started already, they are going to have to prioritize knowledge transfer to make sure that the, the knowledge of the people who've who've been around and experience and you know, have their war wounds can say, well you can try that, but here's what happened when I did it.

As, as experienced professionals retire from the field that knowledge is, has must continue in some way or we're going to start reinventing wheels that we shouldn't have to. So what are the key takeaways from all of this?

One, you won't get bored. There's always gonna be something going on for you.

And two, we're going to probably stay very interested in personal identity technologies for the win. Unless you're a business, at which point we might have to convince you standards development, losing the race makes me very sad. You can turn that around, you know, you just, y'all just have to join in.

And Covid, COVID has permanently, I think, prioritized identity in our strategic planning. And last but not least, institutional knowledge transfer.

Super, super important. Okay, so that was six years of data. How many of you feel proficient? Yep. So what can you get out of this system architecture that's absolutely at the top of the list. So for all of you who didn't raise your hand, which was most of you because you might be really tired or you don't feel proficient, study systems architecture, that's going to give you a sense of just the foundation of what's going on in the world.

And then take your lateral thinking, practice that because then you can take your architecture and start applying the knowledge across two different problems and different solutions. Also, the more you learn, the less you realize, you know, so you're going to have to just embrace that and it'll, it'll all be fine. People who've been learning the longest are getting closer and closer to retirement or leaving the field and we need to plan for that.

And last bit, while I'm not saying that individual interests and business interests have to align, what a great opportunity we have right now this year that they do that. The authentication has hit that list for both parties. So let's embrace that and actually really move the needle on what we can do with MFA and what we can do with past keys and make that happen. Because cuz you know, you want to, you said, all right, so this is my last bit. Why am I passionate about this?

Because I, I want to make the internet better and I want to help individuals and I want to help businesses find interoperable solutions. And we're all part of that. We're all part of that larger movement to build a more secure, equitable and privacy respecting digital world. So I encourage you to think about that. I encourage you to stay curious, stay engaged, stay committed to making changes and we'll get, we'll get through this, we'll actually make this a better, better place. Now I do wanna thank Ian Glaser and Andy Hinde for all their work on this survey for the last six years.

And I wanna thank the rest of you for coming in this morning and for thank you in advance for filling out the survey next year. Thank you Heather. And there are a couple of questions. I'd like to pick one, which is about do we have any, any data also, or maybe you intend to use the data to understand whether the certification has a, sort of helps from a reputation perspective within organizations. So how organizations perceive this. Is there any, any data or any experience on that?

Not yet, but I think we'll be able to derive that data from something else, which is, of course ID pro has the C I D PRO certification, which as more people take that and, and report back about how is that used and as we see it in the field and perhaps as businesses say in their job descriptions, a really nice to have would be. And that's something we can actually discover and derive.

Okay, Thank you. Thank you very much.