By Asanka Abeysinghe, Chief Technology Evangelist, WSO2
As consumers continue to accelerate their adoption of digital technologies, the Experience Economy has become firmly planted in the digital world. In these digital domains, it has become imperative that organizations deliver experiences that are personalized, real-time, geo-sensitive, predictive and omnichannel. Moreover, the teams crafting these digital experiences require a proper methodology to represent personalization attributes firmly and securely in the digital world. The “digital double” is a concept created to address this need.
There are similar concepts to the digital double, largely fostered by the rapid expansion of the Internet of Things (IoT). Digital twins and digital self are good examples, but they each represent just one type of asset. By contrast, the digital double is a representation of people, places, and things in the digital universe.
Your digital double is always active inside the digital space, regardless of physical activity such as sleeping or watching TV. Not only that, it makes decisions on your behalf. Therefore, as digital craftsmen, we must protect the digital doubles we create inside digital applications by applying fundamentals — such as privacy, trust, confidentiality, and security controls — enhancing security through a privacy ecosystem and regulations to protect the digital double against cyber threats.
In understanding the digital double, it’s important to recognise the difference between identity and personality. Identity verification establishes that it is you using a particular system, but the system knows nothing about you other than a few identity attributes. Until the system knows your personality, it cannot get to know you, and it cannot offer a personalised experience.
Customer identity and access management (CIAM) is the way to intimate personalization. CIAM today is mostly about access control, but CIAM in the future will blend customer personality into the business.
The digital double is the fusion of your identity and personality. As we discussed earlier, the digital double represents the digital universe’s people, places, and things. Moreover, the digital double holds the identity and personality attributes with it. However, representing, storing, and exposing these attributes is challenging due to the dynamic nature of both identity and personality attributes. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has established the foundation for a solution to this problem by introducing the decentralized identifiers (DID) specification, which addresses the core architecture, data model, and representations of identity and personality attributes.
The digital double is changing traditional digital identity representation by moving from geocentric (owned and managed by the identity provider) to heliocentric (owned and managed by the individual). The heliocentric nature is an excellent way to handle content management, and compliance requirements must be addressed when accessing and storing identity and personality attributes.
In addition, the dynamic nature of these attributes makes the digital double adaptive and decentralized, which the industry is trying to address through an identity fabric concept that comes with Web 3.0. Unfortunately, there is no unique identifier for the digital assets in the digital ecosystem; therefore, a digital double has to be highly interoperable across various digital identity representations.
CIAM is the foundation that creates and manages the digital double. Hence, the CIAM provider must consider this and provide the digital double as a service to ease application development. To do so, the CIAM provider needs to incorporate a new set of capabilities in addition to the core identity and security features, such as authorisation and authentication in full power. CIAM systems are already capturing identity attributes from defined policy information points (PIPs).
Furthermore, the CIAM provider must introduce application programming interfaces (APIs) and event syncs to capture and record personalisation attributes based on user activities from various sources. This is predominantly interaction data from omnichannel applications and transactions from systems of records. In addition, the CIAM system will silently observe the customer by monitoring their social media posts, including sentiment analysis, and detect interaction patterns and anomalies. The CIAM system will then trigger alerts when anomalies are detected.
Once customers’ attributes are captured, the CIAM provider must enable APIs that enable applications to query the attributes and use them in the digital experiences delivered by the app. Therefore, graph APIs based on GraphQL are vital for implementing attribute retrieval APIs. Additionally, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) processes can associate with the attribute data store and deliver insights on behalf of the business. The extended capabilities listed above let the CIAM provider combine the attributes of a digital double across the business to build a comprehensive personality profile.
The above is largely a review of customer-focused personalization using business-to-consumer (B2C) CIAM, but as a digital craftsman, you must build digital experiences for other types of users. The same concept can be extended to other business models using CIAM, including business-to-business (B2B) CIAM for handling partners and suppliers and business-to-employee (B2E) CIAM for managing employees.
Getting personal with customers is the DNA of the experience economy, and in the digital world, CIAM is the way to initiate personalisation. Moreover, because the digital double is the fusion of each person’s identity and personality, CIAM is needed to provide the foundation that creates and manages the digital double.
