Foreword RATIONALE

Rationale

Whether an institution is performing research, developing a business operation, creating  a product or delivering a service, significant attention must be paid to managing the necessary information. The research teams, analysts, operators and other personnel involved with the work must be able readily to apply and manage the information which is available to them. The relationships between academic institutions, business partners, suppliers and customers, and the information which is exchanged or shared between them must be managed effectively.

To manage information successfully institutions must specify the information requirements for all stages of the information lifecycle from creation, to installation, operation, maintenance and termination. Each situation and activity, which uses the information must be defined, understood, analysed and developed in an appropriate way. Comprehensive specifications need to be produced which define the requirements, functions, processes and information for the activities being addressed and the way that they will contribute to performance of the institution.  

In the FIDIS project, to meet the challenge of bringing together the many different disciplines of identity management, which are illustrated as an entity diagram in Figure 1, there is a need for recommending best practice guidelines which incorporate effective governance and information management.  

Figure 1 

This report makes recommendations for best practice guidelines that may be widely used by FIDIS partner institutions, and external stakeholders, involved with multi-disciplinary activities of identity management. The emphasis of the report is on the delivery and application of a generic method, the Best Practice Method (BPM), that incorporates sound tools and techniques, which may be applied to perform a wide variety of activities, including interoperability.