Decision Making Biases

We all make decisions, and I suspect we feel we make most of those decision objectively... or do we?

Here is a great article from HBR about decision making biases (free access till July 4, 2011), the best part is the survey link at the start of the article. Once you answer the survey, it compares your answers to other respondents' answers and grade your decision making biases from low risk to high risk for the following biases:

Pattern Recognition Bias - The "Oh, I have seen this before. Here is what are going to do ...."
Action Orientation Bias - The need and bias for action in part of decision maker
Stability Bias - The need to do as you have always done it
Social Harmony - The "group think", or "here is what everybody else think/say we should do ..."
Process Orientation Bias - Speaks for itself
Self-Interest  Bias - simply put, thinking what is good for you is good for the firm or whoever suggest an option, always makes it with the best interest of firm in mind.

The one, the jumps at me in particular is the "Social Harmony" bias, specially harmony with upper management. This is one bias I have seen so predominantly is most all decision making. Specially when upper managements do not formally separate discussion and decision and simply voice a strong opinion in a debate. Expressing dissent after that becomes so risky that even if you don't have the bias, you are likely to adopt one temporarily !

W3C Workshop on Identity in the Browser

OK, it is a a little old, but this was an interesting get together of identity community discussing the role browser can play in managing users identity and perhaps authentication. Although it did come up that in the age that more or more people use embedded apps, any identity solution based on the assumption of a runtime environment called a browser may not be sufficient.

What I feel was the most insightful comment though was in the last paragraph of Dick Hardt position paper titled "The
Chicken,
 the 
Egg
 and 
the 
Rooster:
Why
 Internet 
Identity
 is 
Still 
Unsolved":

Identity 
is 
more 
than 
authentication.
The 
success 
of 
Facebook
 et
.al. 
is
 driven 
by

access 
to 
information
 about 
the 
user 
rather 
than 
just 
which 
user 
it 
is. 
A
 broadly

adopted
 solution 
will 
enable 
the 
user 
to 
share 
profile 
information 
and 
delegate

authorization.

This is the key point that I some times referred to it as "Pizza and Delivery", authentication, SSO is like delivery mechanism, but RPs are interested in "information about the user" or attributes and profile, not how it is delivered to them. Much like people who order pizza are interested in pizza not how it is delivered.