Government Digital Identity and Beyond

Our regular chairman, David Bicknell, welcomes all delegates, sponsors, and speakers to our conference and sets out the day’s agenda.

As Britain starts out on life as an independent nation outside of the European Union, Rob Anderson, Principal Analyst for Central Government at GlobalData takes a look at the state of digital identity for government. He questions what we have learned so far in attempts to develop a holistic solution and investigates what the key criteria might be for success. He will also briefly explore how the private sector can be encouraged to participate, and asks whether there is appetite is for building on work done to date or starting afresh.

Lisa Barrett, Director of Digital Identity at Government Digital Service will discusses the real deal with Verify and how digital identity is now scaling in public sector and plans for the private sector and beyond.

Digital identity should be an area of technology that is truly inclusive. This is because the very essence of digital identity concerns our digital self; how we interact online, what information we reveal about ourselves, how we transact with services and apps. Arguably, more than any other area of technology, the design and development of identity solutions should be done using diverse teams.

This session will discuss why diversity is important in the context of digital identity. The session will also discuss how to build an environment of diversity and why diversity can create better digital identity solutions.

How will you know if what you’ve built has met your success criteria? Measuring your success, and failure, is vital when building, iterating and releasing digital services. In this session we’ll talk about how to decide what to measure based on service objectives and user needs, not just classic MI requirements. Doing this early on in the service lifecycle means you know what data you’ll need to collect during your MVP, and what “business as usual” metrics to compare it to. We can’t measure everything. That’s OK, as long as we know what the gaps are before we sign up to the business case!

The current requirement to prove a citizen identity beyond reasonable doubt before obtaining services, creates a ‘high barrier to entry’ model.  The friction created when meeting this requirement, impacts citizen identity uptake and use, negatively. Thus, we need to find ways to balance the need for robust assurance with lower friction. To move to such an environment, where a lower level of identity verification is acceptable, will require innovation by other means to reduce the risk profile of transactions.

The ability to monitor and react in real-time to the activity or transaction that the citizen is performing, is considered to be a vital element of this approach. This session will look at the capabilities that enable this approach?

Detection of fraud and error in real time are an essential component of a modern citizen identity scheme.  The use of real-time fraud analysis, draws on the quality of the identity verification. It can be used to generate transactional and behavioural trust scores, along with analysis of wider data sets. These can then be used to identify potential fraudulent activity as well as identify transaction errors.

User Experience (UX) is a top priority when differentiating digital services with the aim of accelerated adoption and customer intimacy. In the same way that Customer Satisfaction metrics are a Board issue, Digital User Experience is now on the agenda for review.

Organisations recognise the growth in digital fraud and cyber-breach will cause damage to customer confidence and brand reputations and have therefore elevated the importance of Cybersecurity to a C level area of focus.

Achieving a successful digital transformation strategy whilst increasing security continues to be difficult equation to balance for organisations. This presentation will look at the key priorities in achieving a successful approach to these challenges:

• What are the Digital Expectations of Employees and Consumers
• Regulatory requirements in support of Digital Behaviour
• Protecting against Cyber Breach and Mitigating Fraud
• Re-defining Strong Authentication to verify Identity
• The Case for Passwordless
• Why Explicit and Implicit Authentication matters
• Next Generation Authentication needs to be frictionless
• How does Digital Identity support the challenges

The process of creating digital identity for citizens is a complex area covering everything from consumer authentication to identity checks and assurance, as well as areas such as delegated access. It can be argued that citizen identity is where society and technology dovetail. This results in the design of citizen identity schemes being one of the most difficult digital identity challenges to solve. Layer onto that, the need for government to service wide-demographic needs and you have a perfect storm. Citizen identity requires great design and even better execution to balance the needs of usability with security.

This session will look at the challenges and available solutions to this highly problematic and complicated aspect of digital identity.

There is certainly no shortage of exciting technology and inventiveness in the identity industry. However, to truly be innovative, it is important that we don’t lose sight of the users we are designing for and the needs that need to be met.

Adam Lewis, Founding Director at Hippo Digital will talk through some of the work that they have been involved in at the intersection of user-centred design and identity management, demonstrating how a user-centred approach might help us make the best use of existing technology to build valuable identity solutions for users while also highlighting some of the core challenges involved in doing the same. Building on this, he will lead us to consider what a more user-centred future for identity might look like.

Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) is an innovation in the world of identity that is sometimes controversial, but that may hold the promise of true user control over personal data and identity. SSI is known as a decentralised ID system because it is based on blockchain technology. Techniques including zero-knowledge proofs are used alongside SSI to ensure that citizen data can be privacy-enhanced.

This session will introduce you to what SSI is. It will also look at the feasibility of SSI in a government context.

Once again, we look to examples of best digital identity practice, experience and learnings from identity experts across Europe and beyond.

We close with our regular panel session discussing what tomorrow’s identity sector might look like.

Our chair, David Bicknell, summarises some of the highlights of the day and invites delegates into the drink’s reception and final networking session of the day.