Mobile Identity Management: An Enacted View.

Abstract

The growth of mobile business requires the ability to provide context-aware services when and where needed, the development of trust relationships between trading partners, and an ever-expanding capability to reconfigure value chains. These issues are becoming more prominent with the emergence of converged architectures for next generation public networks. The integration of the Internet, traditional telephony networks, and consumer electronics brings mobile business to the forefront. In this context, mobile identity management can play a central role in addressing usability and trust issues in mobile business. For this reason, it is being established as a core service for next-generation mobile telecommunications infrastructures. Mobile identity management is used to identify, acquire, access, and pay for services that follow the user from device to device, location to location, and context to context, and thus it is the network component that holds together novel services on novel networks using innovative business models. In contrast to previous-generation mobile business infrastructures, this represents a pivotal shift in focus from identification to identity. The present paper advocates that this shift calls for an enacted view of technology, since the level of involvement of human qualities is unprecedented when discussing identity. It introduces a view of identity in mobile business based on three principles and finds that this approach is useful in explaining some recent research findings in ubiquitous retailing. Widening the discipline boundaries for future research on identity in mobile business will be essential for the development of effective mobile service provision systems.