Recently I stumbled upon a report called Future Identities in the UK. The purpose of the report is to provide the government in the UK insight into how identities of citizens will develop over the next 10 years. But the insight certainly also applies to how private companies will have to react to this development and certainly also not just in the UK.
The report talks about three different kinds of identities:
Applied to data quality and master data management I think these future kinds of identities will have these consequences:
Biometric identities relates to hard core identity resolution as in fighting terrorism, crime investigation and physical access control but is sometimes even used in simple commercial checks as told in the post Real World Identity. My guess is that we will see biometrics used more as a mean to have better data quality, but not considerable more due to return of investment also as examined in the post Citizen ID and Biometrics.
Biographical identities and the related attributes resembles what we often also calls demographic attributes used in handling data for direct marketing and other purposes of data management. Direct marketing may, as reported in the post Psychographic Data Quality, be in transition to go deeper into big data in order to be psychographic marketing.
Social identities is the new black. As discussed on this blog, latest in the post Defining Social MDM, my guess is that social data master management is going to be big and has to be partly interwoven with using traditional biographical attributes and even, like it or not, biometric attributes. The art of doing that in a proper way is going to be very exciting.
Liliendahl on Data Quality 