They stand like silent sentinels guarding against invasion. They are ever vigilant, unceasing in their determined stance, and unyielding to the natural elements. I am referring to the thousands of saguaro cacti that populate the Arizona desert.
Each year about this time, I visit my mother who lives northwest of Phoenix in the former mining town of Wickenburg. On the way from the airport I usually drive Route 74, also known as Carefree Highway. It runs thirty miles east-to-west through barren desert, passing Lake Pleasant at around the ten-mile mark. For miles upon miles, saguaro are scattered in the desert. With arms uplifted, they seem to be pleading for rain while they keep their lonely vigil.
Wickenburg is best known as a tourist stopover for those heading north to the Laughlin, Nevada casinos. Each year, the town also sponsors “Gold Rush Days” in February, celebrating the mining heydays of bygone times and its rich western and native American heritage, hoping to tempt drivers to linger longer than a cup of coffee.
The real excitement in Wickenburg these days is the Route 93 by-pass project that will skirt the eastern side of downtown and parallel the Hassayampa River. The river flows mostly underground throughout its 100 mile length. While one rarely sees flowing water, the lush vegetation above ground shows clear evidence of the river’s hidden path below. It’s a striking and beautiful contrast to the surrounding arid, harsh landscape.
Besides being of concern to the local shop-owners who rightly fear that the tourist dollars will bypass the town along with the traffic, the very best things about the Wickenburg bypass are the two -- count ‘em two “roundabouts” included in the project. I’ve long experience with my own three versions of roundabouts (in New England, we call them “rotaries”). One is on Route 2 near MCI Concord. Another used to be at the Sagamore Bridge. The third remains at the Bourne Bridge. I know that there are many more, but these are the most familiar to me. What I really like about rotaries is the unmitigated thrill that one gets from having successfully entered and exited the traffic flow -- without collision.
A rotary driving experience is similar to the adrenalin rush that Evel Knievel must have had when he survived the Snake River jump attempt. He didn’t end up where he intended, but he was just happy to be alive. The same is true for many out-of-towners who attempt a Massachusetts rotary. They don’t always end up where they intended (for instance in Maine versus Virginia), but they are glad to have escaped -- mostly in one piece.
You see, there are both formal and practical rules for entering and exiting a rotary. From the Massachusetts drivers manual:
Because only a few states in America have traffic rotaries (traffic circles), many drivers are unfamiliar with rotaries’ right-of-way rules. Be especially careful and generous when extending the right-of-way to other drivers in and near rotaries. When you approach a rotary, you must yield the right-of-way to any vehicles already in the rotary. If traffic in the rotary is heavy, stop at the edge of the rotary and wait until you can enter safely.
Pretty clear -- at least up to the part about being generous. I don’t know many Massachusetts drivers who could be characterized this way. If one were to generously wait for “any” vehicle in the rotary, one could spend one’s entire vacation waiting for the Bourne Rotary to empty.
While the formal driving rules govern how one should yield, the typical Massachusetts driver tends to think of yielding as a sign of weakness. An old-time Massachusetts wag once told me that the best way to enter a rotary was to “never look the other driver in the eye.” This was especially true when driving older model cars with a few dings and scrapes. The other driver surely wouldn’t want to be the next victim of a too-close encounter. The momentary tap of the brakes in the face of an unhesitating, seemingly unaware driver encroaching into one’s direct path would provide more than generous room to squeeze into the flow. Oh, now I understand what they meant …
For the life of me, I cannot figure out why one would want to deliberately introduce rotary mayhem into an unsuspecting, sleepy town like Wickenburg. Many of the towns-folk seem to be of the same mind. Some of these folks are snowbirds who winter in the south and summer up north where rotaries are plentiful. They too are expecting the worst, having experienced it first-hand. Perhaps the town planners thought Wickenburg is a bit too sleepy and are looking for some adrenaline rushes and near-death experiences to liven things up a bit.
Give me a good old-fashioned standard traffic light. It’s pretty clear when one must stop or go. Although that same wag did mention that the yellow light simply means to speed up before it turns red.
While I was in Wickenburg, Mom presented me with the usual list of projects that she’d been accumulating since my last visit. This time it included replacing several 3-way switches that had stopped working properly. These switches are used for areas with multiple points of entry, where you want to be able to switch the lights on or off no matter which entrance is used. The internal contacts tend to wear out after a couple decades of steady use.
Once I began, I discovered that the original electrician had taken some liberties with the connection of the “traveler” wire. Moreover, the new switches weren’t of exactly the same design as the ones I was replacing. Therefore, it took a bit of trial (and, thankfully no errors) along with several trips back forth to the fuse box in order to get the switches operating properly. Mom’s happy. I’m relieved that there were no shocking experiences along the way, and the lighting is as good as new.
These examples of timelessness, resilience, and unnecessary uncertainty got me to thinking of standards and how one should be able to expect that something like a wiring scheme should be universally the same and identical from one place to another. In this case, the local electrician had inserted a bit of his own style, habits, and personality into the job that made it more difficult for another person to repair the system in years to come. One should expect that systems and processes are interoperable.
It is similar with driving patterns, long-formed habits, and new experiences. While the above comments about rotaries are (mostly) tongue-in-cheek, the introduction of roundabouts will seem to native Wickenburg drivers as a completely foreign concept. It will take a while for them to get used to the way that traffic flows. It is tricky, different from the norm, and something with which they are definitely not familiar. It will make their lives difficult for a time and create a needless challenge for many older drivers who will be genuinely fearful of the new order. One should also expect that technology can easily adapt to standard business practices versus the other way around.
The need for standardized behaviors and techniques are all around us. When we flip a light switch, we expect it to go on. When it doesn’t, the diagnosis is simple. Generally speaking, it must be the light bulb. Even a defective switch gives warning with its intermittent failures. The swap-out of the light bulb is also easy because the threads in the bottom are identical to the ones that were in there, whether it be a traditional incandescent or new energy-saving style bulb.
This standardization of something as simple as light bulbs required cooperation among government regulatory bodies, manufacturers, and suppliers. Without this, lighting would not be as omni-present as it is today and certainly not as economical for the consumer.
We are at the stage in the identity management industry, where we must also bring together diverse interests of vendors, enterprise deployers, and government regulators to ensure that we are pursuing a coordinated approach to identity management standardization. This standardization must include, not only technical interoperability standards, but also business best practices for the safe deployment of identity solutions.
Today, there are several somewhat competing initiatives in the identity space. Several of us have been working behind the scenes for the past three years to find common ground among these initiatives so that enterprise deployers will have the assurance that identity products will interoperate with one another. We need to ensure that business best practices can be applied across solution and corporate boundaries. Unless all vendors and community members come together to make a sincere effort at harmonization while still fostering innovation, standardized interoperability and best practices will be difficult to achieve. We’ve made good progress with initiatives like Project Concordia, but this is only a first step.
As I mentioned in a previous blog post, we are nearing the launch of a new initiative. It is designed as an open forum that does not have a “pay-to-play” membership requirement for those who want to make a meaningful contribution. It is also designed so that subject matter experts are able to get things done that are important to them and the community -- quickly and efficiently.
It is structured in a clean “bi-cameral” model where the Leadership Council is responsible for the work output and the Board of Trustees has fiduciary responsibility for the organization. Additionally, it is an open forum where the proceedings are open to examination by the community at large and especially to those interested in identity management topics. This openness will make apparent those who are participating for the growth of the identity space and those who choose to remain on the sidelines. It is also intended to work in close cooperation with traditional standards bodies so that this organization does not produce yet another uncoordinated set of outputs that need to be reconciled with pre-existing technologies.
We have made great progress in involving companies and organizations, large and small from across the identity spectrum. These organizations include traditional enterprise vendors and deployers, worldwide government agencies, as well as Web 2.0 developers and deployers.
We have many of the formative documents in place and are in the process of bringing together the founding team of members. We welcome industry-wide participation and I would encourage anyone interested to contact me directly for further information or simply to offer your thoughts about this.
