When I wrote about Federated Identity Governance for InfoWorld, I spoke to 5 or 6 companies who were successfully federating identity and had been dealing with governance issues. Most of these were also members of the Liberty Aliance. A few people have asked me how it happened that I wrote an article about federation, talked to so many members of Liberty, and yet failed to mention Liberty Alliance in the article.

The easy answer is space. I had to cut 500 or 600 words as it is and was trying to get the key ideas into the space I had. The longer answer is that Liberty has done a great job of putting together the specifications for the technology and it works. That's really the point of the article--the technology works, but the hard part is in layers 8 and 9--the economics and politics of federation. That's where these companies are pioneering federation and leading the rest of us. That's what I was trying to capture.