The team for Scotland’s Online Identity Assurance project has identified two workstreams for its alpha phase, with a focus on end-to-end journeys and standards.
It has also joined the Open Identity Exchange (OIX), the organisation that supports research into identity services and trusted online transactions.
The workstreams, described in Scottish Government Digital blogpost, are scheduled to run until next May. They were discussed at a workshop the project team staged with OIX last week.
One will focus on developing two end-to-end journeys that can be shown to work as proof of concepts. They will centre on applications for child disability living allowance – which will become the responsibility of the new Scottish social security system in 2020 – and for single occupant council tax deduction.
The other will be about identifying what standards need to be in place for service providers and the operability of digital identities between services. It has already received input from teams working on standards in the UK Cabinet Office and the Department of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport.
Verify factors
The decision to work with the OIX reflects on its work with the Cabinet Office over the past five years on identity assurance issues, including the development of the GOV.UK Verify service.
The Scottish Government announced near the end of last year that it wanted to develop a national service independent of Verify, which has since been shifted largely to the private sector identity providers. In June of this year a report indicated that Scotland could adopt a range of options of which Verify could be one.
Image by Jeremy Keith, CC BY 2.0 through flickr