At last Thursday’s highly successful Think Digital Identity For Government 2020 conference, delegates didn’t have that long to wait until what was once the almost sole focus of the UK Identity community, HMG’s GOV.UK Verify, got name-checked; Lisa Barrett, Director of Digital Identity for the Cabinet Office and GDS, has it on her slides for her rapid run-through of Government thinking about ID, an hour in (9.50am).
The problem, at least for some seasoned observers and indeed, previous conference attendees, was that was pretty much the last time the scheme was mentioned.
And that really does signal that after all the years we’ve spent debating how best to make Digital Identity accepted and taken to heart by the British public via Verify, we really are in new territory.
That’s because, over the course of the conference, we heard about many other technologies and products, a heck of a lot about ecosystems and what we need to make them viable – but very little about a system whose struggles to get accepted has fuelled rather too many computer journalists’ agenda over the past decade.
For instance, at the day’s well-attended final panel session, on ‘Futures,’ senior UK (and international) ID thought leaders talked discretely around Verify, until a question from the floor for a definitive statement was made about the software – which, let’s not forget, Barrett herself had flagged, has been used at least once by 5m UK residents and is in use in 22 public sector digital services.
Take Cheryl Stevens, DWP Digital’s Deputy Director, Identity & Trust Services, who used her panel time to talk about the central importance of data in all she and her team does, how Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) may well be of interest to her target users but not for ten years, and other vital areas.
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But, she then told the audience that she and her team had a definite interest these days in what she dubbed “proportionality”:
“There were certainly constraints in the past which as led us to want standards, not handcuffs – hand-rails, not hand-cuffs.”
And given that she then also talked about how there had previously been issues with “de-coupling” of technology, it became clear to some she was talking about Verify. But – and it’s an important but – when asked straight out about Verify, this is what she said:
“Verify absolutely was the right thing to do, and we all learnt an awful lot about it in terms of interoperability and the vital role a standard needs to play.
“But we also learnt that one-size does not fit all when it comes to ID, and that we would be better off with something easier to de-couple into different parts in the future.”
We think that sums it up brilliantly – and that this kind of mature attitude and realism must surely set the basis for a lot-less hysterical conversations, in and out of Government, on the road ahead.
