Looking Forward, Looking Back: Identiverse 2024

Since its inception 15 years ago, Identiverse has looked to do two things:

Promote and share of learning and best practices across the profession to help improve solutions and deployments, and help inform the future direction of the industry.
Bring in sectors adjacent to identity from which we—the industry and its practitioners—can learn and, in turn, to which we can provide valuable input. For several years, we worked on how better to include the cybersecurity community. More recently, we’ve extended this to include the privacy community.

Both these efforts are ongoing, and we’ve also had sporadic but cyclical engagement with specific technical or other interest groups—user experience, decentralised identity, higher education, banking, and healthcare, to name a few. Some have gone on to become embedded in the agenda; others will be back again as guest stars in 2024. We’ve even engaged with the C-suite, and in particular with the CISO community, a group we will continue to work closely with.

What’s Been Missing?

One group that we haven’t yet truly engaged, though, is “the business”. In other words: those roles and teams within organisations that own or oversee projects that are directly revenue-generating or at minimum aligned with growth or service quality (think customer retention and employee satisfaction) rather than with risk mitigation.

These groups have budget. They have visibility at the C-level. Their projects are frequently central, if not indispensable, to the strategic success of the entire organisation, whether private or public sector. We in the digital identity industry know that our work is, at the very least, a critical part of those projects. Arguably it’s the critical part. And yet these groups, and their leaders, don’t know about what we do and so don’t understand why it’s so important.

That has to change, and in 2024 we intend to make a real start at doing so, and it all starts with the Identiverse Advisory Board.

The Advisory Board

One of the tasks of the Identiverse Advisory Board each year is to consider the overall conference focus for the conference. Let’s pick that sentence apart a little bit.

First, “the Identiverse Advisory Board.” Board members collectively provide critical input to the

strategic direction of the conference. A subset of the full board—the content committee—are additionally responsible for proposal review, content selection, and our content review process (more on this in a future blog post).

Then: “to consider”. We’ve tried a variety of processes over the years—it’s nice to keep things fluid!—but broadly speaking what happens is that the Chair consults with some or all of the board for some initial ideas; then circulates them through the group; and eventually we settle on something that we all feel is important and relevant.

Finally: “overall focus”. We used to have a ‘theme’. Some of you might even remember them: “Borderless Identity”, or “The Modern Identity Revolution”, anyone? As the conference grew, though, we realised that limiting ourselves to a single theme was just that—limiting. Not to mention that in reality we’d never really stuck purely to a single theme. Hence: conference focus. I like to think of our focus like a herbal tea, or like subtle seasoning in a casserole. It’s a flavour that infuses all the constituent parts of the event but doesn’t overpower it.

The last three years have been: “The Identity Experience” — this was the COVID conference in 2021, and we had a specific UX track to support the focus; “Personal Identity” in 2022; last year we had “Identity Everywhere”.

The overall focus for Identiverse 2024 is The Identity Engine: you can read more about it here. It informs the call for presentation, and it will also help guide things like keynote selection and other elements of the conference and the event — with the aim of helping our industry engage more effectively in those crucial ‘business’ conversations.

What’s Next?

So now we have our goals, our theme, and our Advisory Committee hard at work to create an exciting agenda for Identiverse 2024. In the coming months, you’ll be invited to read blog posts and attend webinars that preview the type of content we’ll have for you in Las Vegas. You’ll also have time to dive into the agenda and make this year’s conference everything you need it to be. Let’s get ready to tune our identity engine!