Making Identity Easy for Everyone, with Heather Flanagan, Spherical Cow Consulting – Podcast Episode 74
Let's talk about digital identity with Heather Flanagan, Principal at Spherical Cow Consulting. In episode 74, Heather Flanagan discusses making identity easy for everyone – how to explain digital identity to people outside of the identity industry, why is it important for everyone to understand, and what the industry can do to improve the understanding of identity for everyone. [Transcript below] "If you talk to any identity professional, they will agree that passwords are one of the biggest, possibly the biggest challenge facing the industry. So how are we solving it?" Heather Flanagan, Principal at Spherical Cow Consulting and choreographer for Identity Flash Mob, comes from a position that the Internet is led by people, powered by words, and inspired by technology. She has been involved in leadership roles with some of the most technical, volunteer-driven organisations on the Internet, including IDPro as Principal Editor, the IETF, the IAB, and the IRTF as RFC Series Editor, ICANN as Technical Writer, and REFEDS as Coordinator, just to name a few. If there is work going on to develop new Internet standards, or discussions around the future of digital identity, she is interested in engaging in that work. Connect with Heather on LinkedIn. We’ll be continuing this conversation on Twitter using #LTADI – join us @ubisecure! Go to our YouTube to watch the video transcript for this episode. Podcast transcript Let’s Talk About Digital Identity, the podcast connecting identity and business. I am your host, Oscar Santolalla. Oscar Santolalla: Hello and thank you for joining us. Today, we are going to hear from an expert in identity about - how from the perspective of, let's say regular people, most of the people, who are not involved in the identity industry, how much they understand the identity, the methods, the technology and everything that we in this industry are building. So, we're going to talk about how we can make identity easy for everyone. For that, our guest is Heather Flanagan. She is Principal at Spherical Cow Consulting, and Choreographer for Identity Flash Mob. She comes from a position that the Internet is led by people powered by words and inspired by technology. She has been involved in leadership roles with some of the most technical, volunteer-driven organisations on the internet, including IDPro as Principal Editor, the IETF, the IAB as RFC Series Editor, ICANN as Technical Writer just to name a few. Hello, Heather. Heather Flanagan: Hello, Oscar. Oscar: Nice having you. Heather: Thank you. It's great to be here. Oscar: Excellent. This is going to be super fun talking about how to make identity easy for everyone. Let's see how our conversation goes. So yeah, let's get started, let's talk about digital identity. First, I would like to hear a bit more about yourself, please tell us your journey to this world of identity. Heather: Oh, you know, very few people actually decide that "You know, digital identity, that's going to be my career." In my case, I have a liberal arts degree as a history major, and a library science degree for my master's degree. I mean, I was supposed to be a librarian when I grew up. But as is often the case, once the person falls into tech, everything ends up touching on digital identity. So immediately after university, I ended up working for the public research division of a newspaper that was just starting up an ISP. So, this was the mid '90s, there weren't a lot of experienced tech people to hire. And that ISP started hiring people who, you know, are you smart? Are you logical? Can you learn from a book? And there, as a sysadmin, I had to worry about creating user accounts and making sure that those users were able to access what they were allowed to on a system and only what they were allowed to on a system. When I left the ISP, I went to work for a large software company where again,