Mobile Identity Management: An Enacted View

Growth of mobile business requires the ability to provide context aware services when and where needed, the development of trust relationships between trading partners and the ever-expanding capability for reconfiguration of value chains. These issues become even more prominent by the emergence of converged architectures for next generation public networks, a result of integration of the Internet, traditional telephony networks and consumer electronics, which brings mobile business to the forefront. In this context, mobile identity management can play a central role to address usability and trust issues in mobile business. For this reason, it is being established as a core service for next generation mobile telecommunications infrastructures. Mobile identity management is used to identify, acquire, access and pay for services that follow the user from device to device, location to location and context to context and thus, becomes the network component that holds together novel services on novel networks using innovative business models. In contrast to previous generation mobile business infrastructures, this represents a pivotal shift in focus from identification to identity. In this paper we advocate that this shift calls for the enacted view of technology since the level of involvement of human qualities is unprecedented when discussing identity. We introduce a view of identity in mobile business based on three principles and we find that this approach is useful in explaining some recent research findings in ubiquitous retailing. We expect that widening the discipline boundaries for future research on identity in