John Gotze says that digital identity should have won the award for "Most Overlooked Burning Issue of the Year" in 2003. Denmark is very progressive in eGovernment and facing issues that most governments won't see for a few years, so its a good idea for any government CIO to follow what Denmark does closely and anticipate the problems Denmark faces as they blaze the way.

One of Denmark's initiatives for 2003 was a nationwide digital signature program. Says John:

The certificates (OCES) are politically mandated for future online public services, but the banks and other players already have own established solutions and are reluctant to move on to OCES, so we're clearly not done yet, if anyone thought that was the case. The challenge is that digital identity management is about so much more than digital signatures.

From Gotzeblogged
Referenced Mon Dec 15 2003 09:24:29 GMT-0700

Another example of where digital identity is proving to be an issue is in Denmark's aggressive roll-out of Web services. A case study on Loosely Coupled talks about how Web services lead to digital identity:

Denmark's Immigration Service, which has embarked on a major web services initiative to provide information to other Danish government departments and ultimately the general public, fears that it faces growing costs to manage user access privileges unless it can automate the management of multiple identities. Its ability to do so depends partly on how quickly standards are ratified and, in turn, how fast its identity management software supplier can absorb the standards in its own applications.

From Information access waits on ID standards
Referenced Mon Dec 15 2003 09:27:37 GMT-0700

I think we're going to see more and more of this as organizations understand that aligning IT with business means that we have to stop worrying about controlling access to networks and servers and start worrying about access control for documents, records, and other fine-grained resources.