Imagine how tedious life would be if you needed a separate, specially issued debit card for each grocery store, gas station, restaurant, pharmacy, department store or Web retailer that you patronized
It would burdensome. It would also be costly to the businesses involved if each one had to issue those identity credentials to every one of its customers. And who would bear the brunt of those costs?

That is pretty much the operative situation, though, for government agencies when it comes to managing employees, consultants and contractors, and then controlling which information technology resources and networks they can tap into, whether they are turning on their computers in the morning, updating their personnel records in a human resources system, booking work-related travel, or signing in to an information-sharing wiki. Those IT access security mechanisms, essential as they are, are hardly ever a single system. Instead, each application or system typically has its own access control system.

As a result, users must remember multiple passwords and log-in methods, while IT departments must handle the grunt work of manually managing duplicative systems.

The link for this article located at Federal Computer Week is no longer available.