The digital age continues to revolutionise the way organisations deliver goods and services. In addition, the proliferation of mobile devices and the associated instantaneous delivery has also exponentially increased the expectations of consumers and constituents.

If we think of this as the digital challenge, an enterprise must balance the diametrically opposed constraints of being more responsive and agile while keeping information, applications and services secure.

A key enabler that businesses need for the Digital Economy is a toolset to manage identity on a contextual basis.

In a business sense a person may also hold employee, prospect, partner, shareholder or other relationships. While all of those contexts are clear, the things that make them different are also the things that make them the same. Thus organisations need to manage digital identities that truly reflect the real world where people are part of various communities, business roles, customers, consumers and constituents.

Some of the challenges an effective identity management solution must meet for the digital age include:

• federated access
• single sign on
• authorisation support
• cloud readiness
• platform independence
• identity lifecycle and role management

If you are interested in discussing your identity management needs with Hyro please email Peter Mountford.

It is not often that one hears the word Microsoft in a conversation about an open source software project. That’s why I was interested to chat with the MahTweets project overlord Paul Jenkins (@Aeoth) at Microsoft’s REMIX10 Conference (#remixau) about this social media aggregation client.

I asked what is special and different about this project, and Paul said:

“unlike a lot of other clients this one focuses solely on Windows, rather than trying to be all things to all platforms”

He also noted that “this enables us to personalise it a lot better, it’s an open source project too.”

Then I asked what are some of the cool features of MahTweets? And Paul’s answer was:

“Streaming realtime search is probably the best feature. During the ABC program Q and A (#qanda) there are so many tweets it’s hard to keep up and our streaming search pushes all of the tweets to your MahTweets client.”

I noted that it’s pretty unusual to see both ‘open source’ and ‘Microsoft’ in the same sentence. Then Nick Hodge from Microsoft explained that “the reason why MahTweets is so advanced is that it uses a lot of pre-existing open source elements such as TweetSharp, Hammock, Json.NET, IronPython along with the goodwill and effort of the development community.”

Nick also commented that “it comes down to making a client you can use day in and day out for things like Twitter and Facebook”.

Paul noted that there are about 2,500 users each for Twitter and Facebook via OAuth.

Which had me asking how they have found working in with Twitter and Facebook APIs and OAuth?

Paul said “I like OAuth; Twitter’s API is shaky at best - they’ll change things that break 90% of the clients and change it back because it doesn’t work; and Facebook is worse. The Facebook documentation is very bad.”

You can checkout MahTweets at www.mahtweets.com

Kate Carruthers has been appointed Strategy Consultant within Hyro’s expanding business and technology strategy practice.

Kate joins Hyro having held a range of senior management and advisory roles with organisations such as GE, AMP, Citibank, Westfield and NSW Treasury. 

Her appointment signals Hyro’s commitment to remaining at the forefront of the digital transformation that is reshaping the way all businesses and governments engage with, sell to, service and interact with consumers.

“Kate is a highly respected leader in her field and her experience at defining enterprise-level business and technology strategy strengthens our strategy capability and complements our existing strengths in the planning and technical delivery of digital customer experiences” said Mark Neely, Hyro’s Director of Strategy. “Kate’s background gives her a unique understanding of the challenges major organisations face in planning and executing business initiatives across digital channels”.

According to Carruthers, “The digital customer interface is now the critical channel for Australian business. We know that around 40%-50% of customer interactions with organisations, their brands and their products and services happen via digital channels. Our clients now realise these channels cannot be dealt with in isolation, or via ad-hoc initiatives. They must be included within all corporate planning activities, and given the priority they deserve. Having the capability to deliver on strategy, creative and technical fronts makes Hyro an interesting place to be. Very few companies have the ability to work with clients to plan and deliver digital services from the 60,000 foot strategic planning perspective and right through to ground-level technical implementation.”