K6 Blog

By Ken Moyle As practitioners in the Digital Transformation space, we hear our share of concerns about authentication, especially in the area of electronic contracts. When we get asked, we find it’s important to clarify what is meant by authentication.  For example:  In IT terms, authentication means using a previously issued credential to grant access to a system.  So, when I use my userID and password to log onto my email account, I have authenticated myself. In legal terms, authentication means proving the genuineness of a document or any part of it, including a signature.  To get a document entered into evidence, I will need to establish a foundation and I will need to fend off any objections to the authenticity of the document or its contents. When we are talking about signatures, neither of those definitions really fits. And that’s because we often will use the term “authentication” when we really mean “attribution.” After all, as a party...

By Ken Moyle Last week I revisited the history behind the rapid adoption of electronic commerce in the US over the past 15 years, along with a suggestion that we may be in for some growing pains.  Online identity and trust are still in their adolescence here, and if we do not work toward a more meaningful means of establishing online trust, we will not achieve the true potential of digital transactions. On the other side of the spectrum lies the European Union.  While America was building private sector e-commerce empires with low-risk, low value transactions in the 1990’s, Europe instead worked on an electronic commerce model that focused on minimizing online risk.  They had good reasons for this: their mission was to create a framework to support a “digital agenda” for online delivery of government services.  As I have previousy shared, "Government agencies in the US have been pressured for years to offer paperless alternatives, but concerns about...

By Ken Moyle Online enterprises in the US have been massively successful in turning the Internet into a well-oiled engine for consumer transactions.  By any measure, US companies have been quicker to market, more innovative and have reaped greater financial reward by far than any other economy.  Electronic signatures and records have been replacing paper at a healthy clip, and the introduction of mobile devices has led to the inevitability of “digital transformation” of all paper-based processes, everywhere.   After two decades with our foot on the accelerator, maybe it’s time to learn to use the clutch and shift into a higher gear. The Internet gold rush that began in the 1990’s supported a speculative, high-risk, high-reward mindset among entrepreneurs in the emerging “electronic commerce” industry in the United States.  Those with a high risk tolerance, who opted for speed over caution, were handsomely rewarded in an era characterized by exuberance over...