The irresistible force of social media is colliding with the immovable object of enterprise risk management, and organizations need to take steps to ensure that social identities reach “business grade,” according to a recent report from Constellation Research.
The study, “The Consumerization of Identity,” reveals that social logon and enterprise risk management are often at odds. Personal information is the lifeblood of social media companies, Constellation notes, and they offer social logon because it provides them with new forms of valuable data.
Businesses need to carefully understand the role of identification in transaction risk management, the report says. The future of social logon in the enterprise lies in richer, more relevant personal information or “attributes” being made available by social identity providers.
“There is nothing more personal than identity, but identity online may not be what people think it is,” Steve Wilson, vice president and principal analyst at Constellation, said in a statement. “Businesses use identification as part of their risk management regime; the identities provided by Facebook, Google, Twitter and so on are super convenient but they only scratch the surface of what enterprises really need to know.”
The big social media sites are experimenting with how to monetize all the information they have about their members, Wilson said. “My work is starting to uncover the hidden dimensions of social identity,” Wilson said. “My aim is to help businesses better understand their identification needs and identity providers to create sharper, richer identity services.”
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