If large agencies are willing to accept authentication from third parties, it means that users will no longer have to remember their username and password for each different agency they deal with. One username and password they use on a regular basis is all the need to access the services from any number of government agencies.

It is good for government agencies, it simplifies their task by using a third party to provide industry standard authentication and removing their involvement in password management.

The individual still has to prove their identity to each government agency, but once the identity is proven, management will be simplified.

The system is being constructed so agencies will not be able to match data on the OpenID provided. Though who does not have more than one Yahoo!, PayPal, Google, or one of the other providers OpenIDs? I only have 5 or 6. The paranoid could have one openID per agency, they just have to remember which one they need for each agency. While the rest of us settle down to doing business with government on a more secure basis.

NZ’s Identity Verification Service

I find it hard to believe the UN ranking New Zealand 10 spots below Australia (18th and 8th respectively) in their e-government readiness rankings.

New Zealand are doing some of the most innovate work in the world in e-government, just look at the Police Act wiki. The latest challenge taken on by NZ is their All-of-government Authentication Programme. The Identity Verification Service (IVS) is a federated identity system that citizens can use to interact with all government agencies on the web.

While there are people concerned about the privacy issues, a single identity makes data matching easier. I will assume that the current safeguards about data matching will cover any new system and that the only data that will be available to agencies is the identity and possibly contact details (address, phone number, email etc.).

The advantages to both government agencies and individuals are considerable. An individual will only have to prove their identity to one government agency to be able to interact will all government agencies online, without having to prove your identity and all that entails to each agency. For government agencies there will be some work to modify existing system to deal with the new identity system. But all future systems, will only have to deal with a single system, with the development (including costs) spread over a large number of agencies. The big plus is that the agencies will not have to create and authorise identities for all their customers, as process will be shared across all agencies.

If I was on the east coast of Australia I would be looking at going to the Managing Identity in New Zealand: Conference 08, even though I do not expect anything similar in Australia soon, due to the extra level of federal, state and local government here.