I should know better.
I walked into a meeting of business types recently and started talking about their IAM service, how provisioning would be implemented and how SSO was part of the next release. SSO was going to be a good thing. Their users would very much enjoy SSO!
Except that they had no idea what SSO was…
The thing is that the audience — all very capable professionals in their own right — were having a hard enough time with the acronym soup already presented. They were still struggling with the picture of permissions for users being moved from one system to another. They were all still mapping their view of what the application did with what IAM would bring to the table. Their gaze grew distant, shoulders sagged, connection closed.
Why didn’t I just say Login Service? These people login to their computers every day. They login to their online banking, and their Facebook accounts. They login to their phones. They get login.
Words do matter in IAM. Figure out who you are talking to and use the right ones.
Mike
