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Gary Rowe, CEO, Principal Consulting Analyst

Gary Rowe is a seasoned technology analyst, consultant, advisor, executive and entrepreneur. Mr. Rowe helped architect, build and sell two companies and has been on the forefront the standardization and business application of core infrastructure technologies over the past 35 years. Core areas of focus include identity management, meta-directories, cloud computing, security/risk management, messaging, privacy and personal clouds.

He was President of Burton Group from 1999 to 2010, the leading technology infrastructure research and consulting firm. Mr. Rowe grew Burton to over $30+ million in revenue on a self-funded basis, sold Burton to Gartner in 2010 and supported the acquisition as Burton President at Gartner.

Mr. Rowe has personally led over 100 consulting engagements, 50+ educational seminars, published over 20 research reports/articles and led three significant technology industry initiatives. His combination of business skills and his deep understanding of technology provides a balanced perspective for clients.

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Expertise:

Identity and Access Management (IAM)
Internet of Things (IoT)
Blockchain

Workshops

The Future of Identity Management

Recently Published Research

Privacy Beyond Compliance

Privacy is broken, and people and businesses are paying the price. The costs of privacy compliance keep going up, while the real benefits to individuals (such as customers, employees and independent contractors) keep going down. This foundational research report helps IT executives frame the already-too-broad “privacy” discussion to more cost-effectively deal with compulsory privacy compliance issues. This report explores how companies may get maximum leverage from their privacy compliance costs, and deliver more benefit to their customers, partners, shareholders and employees. “Privacy beyond compliance” is an invitation to embrace privacy compliance costs and even to incur additional costs in those organizational settings where an ounce of privacy prevention may be worth a pound of security or potential liability cure. In the proper circumstances an ROI is possible that potentially converts privacy from an isolated regulatory cost center into an integrated profit center for the well- managed enterprise. In this report, TechVision Research explores the ways in which privacy-related sunk costs can help to improve overall enterprise information system integrity. This report suggests that the ROI from privacy expenses can be improved by thoughtful leverage of unavoidable privacy-related costs, and the report identifies more than a dozen examples of situations in which privacy-related costs can be reasonably managed as a “leveraged investment” toward improving security and/or mitigating other enterprise risks. In this report, we also suggest that “privacy” challenges are a symptom of the underlying illness of enterprise information “leakiness” caused by network complexity. Plugging these leaks requires expenditures directed to improve the reliability of both the technology, the people and the processes in a given enterprise network system. We believe enhancing this “socio-technical” system reliability yields additional benefits by improving security and mitigating a multitude of enterprise risks. This report covers:

The relationship between privacy-related sunk costs and overall enterprise information system integrity
The value of looking at privacy issues through the broader enterprise risk lens
The opportunity to convert privacy costs into positive business outcomes
The value of focusing on socio-technical system reliability
Integrating privacy costs into the overall enterprise risk planning

The End of EA and IT As We Know IT

IT Enterprise Architecture (EA) has a reasonably long history with many organizations having EA teams in place. EA is supposed to be a way of logically dealing with the ever growing IT complexity and in some optimal way driving the strategic goals the enterprise is striving for. However, have these teams delivered on this promise? Unfortunately, the answer is usually unclear and too often at TechVision Research we’ve seen these teams as fodder for elimination during cost cutting. Even during good economic times we still see these teams as cost cutting targets because it’s so difficult to identify their true value. This is especially true for those enterprises that see IT as a cost center. On the surface, Enterprise Architecture sounds like a good thing: what IT executive does not want to optimize IT? In most organizations the CIO is seen as the strategic guru of technology in the business and EA is often a part of his/her team. Yet, we have rarely seen the case for general agreement that EA is a necessity for business success. We can argue that even though EA has existed for decades and created many standards, policies, diagrams – and all the meetings to stamp approvals – much of the effort has been driving less redundancy, fewer applications and other compromises for cost reductions, not for disruptive competitive advantage. The reality of EA is we have colleagues at very large companies who were head of (or a key member of) the IT EA team leaving as either victims of cost cutting or just being tired of conducting futile endeavors that have little impact and still require continuous justification for their existence. In this report we suggest it’s time we accept the reality that the EA function as we know it is of little use in today’s IT and will be of even less use in the future as more organizations shift their services and technology to the cloud. As discussed in this report, EA must evolve to stay (or for the first time become) relevant to the business. This report covers:

The relationship between EA and the ever-increasing IT complexity
Is the tight coupling between Enterprise Strategic Planning and EA good or bad?
Why large IT frameworks have failed to produce useful measurable business results
What is Enterprise Architecture in the age of consumerization/cloud?
Should EA become Enterprise IT Product Managers?
Why EA should be about extracting the maximum advantage for the enterprise, scratching out competitive advantage by the sum is greater that the component parts
What the new Enterprise IT World looks like and how EA must evolve to stay relevant

The Future of Identity Management

Identity Management is at the core of the secure IT infrastructure that every company, government agency and institute of higher education strives to achieve. It is one of the most fundamental building blocks in support of any level of communication, collaboration or commerce within an organization or across the Internet.

Despite the decades of investment and hard work, many organizations face greater identity management challenges today than they did 15 years ago. Today, many organizations struggle with a hodge-podge of silo’d, poorly or non-interoperable IAM functions that are impossible to govern properly and are hindering proper risk management.

This highly actionable report supports our clients as they develop five-year technology infrastructure plans. In this report we make specific projections as to where we believe Identity Management will be going over the next five years and we describe a model for identity abstraction that provides an extensible services oriented architecture.

To provide our clients with the most comprehensive view of Identity Management, we augment our own expertise with the insights of what we consider to be the top thought leaders and industry experts to deliver the most comprehensive perspective on the Future of Identity Management.

TVR Crosstalk Report: Identity and Data Governance

What are the connections between identity and data in the enterprise? When one protects identity, they are really protecting data: data that is a representation of the identity. Unfortunately, as discussed in this new CrossTalk report by TechVision Research most organizations don’t have data management and even when they do have data management, the identity data is usually left out of the discussion. At TechVision Research we continually see data mismanagement undermining all aspects of the business function. As Noreen Kendle has experienced “data mess-up is equal opportunity across all types of data, including identity data.” Noreen goes on to say “I’ve seen companies overwrite big text fields with identity-related information primarily because they don’t want to stop and enhance the database schema and structures: this includes credit card numbers, social security numbers, etc.” Obviously, this is a huge privacy issue because the fields are not identified as identity fields and the IT staff is oblivious to the situation. Bill Bonney speaks from experience building an IdM practice as he “agrees that overloading is an issue.” But, as Bill likes to point out, “It’s not just overloading, it’s making assumptions about what is in a field and assumptions about how the field is evaluated and before you know it you have sub-processes built up around a falsely validated field.” This establishes a false foundation that eventually causes the entire trust chain to break. As Bill states, “inevitably, someone will use the data based on how it was first created (the field label of record).” This is a symptom of a far greater problem. There is a huge assumption made by IT staff and the identity management tools they use that the data fields are accurately representing the data stored in the field. This just isn’t so! Given this reality of identity and data mismanagement in the enterprise, this report focuses on the following key concerns:

The evolution of identity data as its own domain
The impact of silos on identity data management
The potential of virtual directories as an identity data management approach
The impact of data reuse on identity and the resulting authenticity decay
Identity data governance: is built on a foundation of quicksand

There are things organizations can be doing today to address these concerns. Specifically, this report discusses a five-step program for identity data governance based upon the team’s experience working with data and identity in F1000 enterprise.

Internet of Things (IoT) Reality Check

At TechVision, we believe there is significant value in cutting through the hype surrounding the impact of connecting autonomous and semi-autonomous devices together in the Internet of Things (IoT). While much of the press coverage centers on the direct impact on humans (self-driving cars, automated appliances, etc.), the economic engine driving IoT are the billions of interactions we will never see. There will certainly be value derived from exposing every consumer to data-driven outcomes, but there will be significantly greater value created by putting every supply chain, production line, maintenance process, and support manager in touch with large pools of product-focused data that will cause an explosion in optimization within every industry to take place and then allow companies to both open new markets and develop new ways to deliver value to customers. In this report, we focus on the pure potential of IoT and how an enterprise may best leverage this potential. More importantly, in this report we lay out the key challenges one must overcome before even attempting to leverage IoT.

Blockchain Level Set

Blockchain is one of the most hyped new technologies we’ve seen in a long time. Thousands of start-ups are leveraging Blockchain, most established vendors are investigating it and enterprise IT is trying to understand its applicability to their business needs. This seminal report is the first of a series of Blockchain-related research reports and it sets the foundation for organizations to get the basics of Blockchain right. At it’s core, Blockchain is a decentralized method of recording and verifying transactions while ensuring that the record’s authenticity. It may be thought of as an anonymous ledger that cannot be erased. As many IT people know, Blockchain is best known as the technology behind Bitcoin and it can be used as a decentralized means of verifying and recording financial transactions. As discussed in this report, Blockchain can be applied to many other enterprise use cases beyond Bitcoin. This report will separate the hype from reality as it provides the basics of Blockchain and assesses the impact on organizations, consumers and technology infrastructure. This report covers: