Title: STRUCTURE AND CONTENT

Structure and Content

Mobile Identity Management (MIdM) with all its facets is becoming ever more important for today’s organisations and users. Increasingly more new services and applications scenarios are being discussed and introduced into the market, offering individuals the possibility to interact with other people or organisations via mobile communication networks in an easy and convenient way. The resulting markets for mobile applications and services and their underlying mechanisms have been investigated by scientists and market research institutions in the past years and various contributions to their understanding were made in both the scientific and practitioner’s literature. 

As initially discussed in FIDIS deliverables D11.1, D11.2, and D11.5, user centricity can be considered an important factor for mobility and identity and the services being used in this context. Consequently user centricity plays a major role in this report. Starting from this notion, Chapter discusses the four sector model for communicational contexts (governmental, work-related, public, private), established in social science, by which markets for existing mobile solutions, from the perspective of the user of a mobile device, are categorised. In general, markets are distinguished into inner-sector and cross-sector mobile applications and services. While established processes are important when the governmental and work-related contexts are involved, recent trends and fashions becomes a driving force for applications and services that are going to be used in the public sector (or at least in a public environment). In addition for inner- and cross-sector solutions questions of identity and identity management become important. This is especially true when the private communicational context is affected.

Chapter analyses the legal perspective and the requirements from data protection legislation and other compliance related statutes towards mobile services and applications. To this regard, the user control perspective can be considered an integral part of data protection and is therefore discussed in this context. As discussed in earlier chapters, it can be assumed that the more control over their privacy users can achieve on their own, the fewer external protection mechanisms may be necessary. Accordingly, the data protection discussion shows that Mobile Identity management (MIdM) and Identity management (IdM) are useful instruments to support privacy protection (cp. Chapter ). At the same time the domain of mobile markets is creating a major need for privacy protection, especially due to its extensive use of location information as a basis for basic communication functions as well as a basis for location based services and applications.

Following up on the user-centric markets and the compliance/law perspective, Chapter starts with the analysis of the relevant players in the market for mobile applications and services. These can be arranged into value chains, which are suitable for illustrating value-adding activities among the individual players. For the analysis undertaken here, the players of note for the value chain are (1.) mobile operator, (2.) the service provider (e.g. for LBS applications and services) and (3.) the users/customers. Furthermore, relevant economic theories that help to better understand the adoption and trust building mechanisms of customers and end-users using mobile services and applications are discussed, in order to explain the relevant market mechanisms. These theories include:

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Furthermore, requirements for continuous trust building are presented that should help organisations to streamline their product and service development efforts for mobile applications. These theories offer a starting point to analyse the impact of MIdM technology, legislation, and customer behaviour towards the customers’ acceptance to use a newly introduced technology or service. While explaining acceptance and trust into new services is important, other aspects also play a vital role. When providing mobile applications and services, information is important as well, as it is provided in a non-static but interactive and real-time way, integrating the contextual aspects into the communication between the different players. While an effective use of the provided data offers a higher convenience from services tailored to the needs of users, this also can result into issues with regard to the privacy and security aspects. Consequently, the balance between convenience of service provision and security/privacy becomes an aspect to be investigated. Here, the PoC model offers an explanatory model to better understand the decision processes from the customers’ perspective.  

However, in order to include all relevant aspects, new and extended models seem to be necessary. In order to combine the previously discussed aspects (markets, compliance/law, and economic theories) Chapter proposes initial ideas for a framework which can give a holistic view on MIdM technology from various relevant perspectives. Here, an approach similar to the balanced scorecard concept, which is developed and widely used for decision support and performance measurement, is taken, in order to combine the different perspectives on MIdM and mobile services and to overcome some limitations of the theories being introduced in Chapter . Derived from TAM, PoC, and TRA, the driving parameters/factors for the explanation of the adoption and trust building seem to be: (1.) trust, (2.) usefulness, (3.) ease of use, (4.) convenience, and (5.) privacy. These evidently should be included when analysing markets for mobile application and especially the user/customer perspective. Other relevant perspectives are the technology perspective, the market perspective, the environment perspective, and the law/regulation perspective, which are linked to the strategies of an analysed product and service.

Using this framework mobile operators and service providers should get the opportunity to streamline their product development efforts for mobile applications and to offer better products and services tailored towards the needs of users and customers. However, future research should focus on the possibilities to apply the proposed framework, the identification of relevant factors, and the identification of their interconnections on each other. 

Chapter summarises the findings and gives an outlook on further research opportunities and developments in the market for mobile applications and services. Due to the decline in the revenues for classical, voice-based communications the telecommunications industry is driven towards new business models offering new possibilities to generate profits. However, such newly built services should be built towards the customers’ needs in order to be successful. Also, such new services need infrastructure such as the SIM card to manage mobile identities or to offer services such as for payment via the mobile phone or for authentication towards accounts. These aspects will be discussed in the context of the ongoing work of FIDIS Work Package 11.