Shaping the Future of IAM: One Year into InCommon’s Strategic Vision

The creation of InCommon’s Futures2 Strategy was driven by a critical inflection point in R&E’s identity and access management landscape. After more than 20 years, the nCommon community found itself navigating significant changes. New commercial competitors were entering the market, security concerns were escalating, and organizations faced growing skills gaps and knowledge loss. These shifts left institutions questioning what infrastructure they would need for the coming decade.

Recognizing these challenges, the InCommon Steering Committee and Leadership initiated a comprehensive planning process to chart the path forward. Through extensive community consultation — including focus groups, surveys, and stakeholder interviews — it became clear that InCommon needed to evolve beyond its traditional role. 

The community needed InCommon to step up as a trusted advisor for IAM best practices unique to R&E, helping institutions navigate an increasingly complex landscape while enabling secure, seamless collaboration at scale. This strategy report emerged as the roadmap for that transformation, laying out how InCommon would serve as the trusted guide for its community through 2028 and beyond.

The processes used to develop the Futures2 Report set a kind of stage for these initial activity areas to reveal themselves. 

The old saying “I’d rather be lucky than good” might appear to apply here, but it doesn’t. The toolkit, federal compliance standards, and IAM architecture are artifacts created by gathering solid data and synthesizing it well with our community leaders and our partner, SecondMuse.

InCommon has long been focused on a particular set of collaboration challenges. Our awakening, if you can call it that, has been in stepping back and appreciating the extensibility of the value of this infrastructure and its associated services. The pursuits of the academy are diverse, and it is hard to think of a context where InCommon can’t help. 

We’re learning how to talk about the value of InCommon in new ways to appeal to new communities. In a way, the last 20 years scratched the surface of InCommon’s value. It is time to dig in.

As is always the case, we encourage community involvement through the myriad established community working groups and advisory bodies. We routinely solicit feedback from these participants as an enthusiastic and engaged group of practitioners. 

In 2025, Internet2 and InCommon Federation will be reshaping a variety of community touch points, and most of them are driven by the need for high-quality and timely data as our services are becoming increasingly functionally rich.

In 2025, InCommon is focusing on three core initiatives. 

First, we’re revamping communications and outreach to engage more with the community, helping organizations better articulate the value of identity management to stakeholders.

Second, we’re expanding knowledge sharing and training through an enhanced InCommon Academy and community-driven learning programs, recognizing that the best solutions come from shared experiences. 

Third, we’re implementing robust data management systems to track and measure impact across the community and service usage. 

Finally, we’re helping institutions and their partners to address immediate challenges like federal compliance requirements for increased security while also supporting emerging needs in secure course sharing and distance learning. 

Through these coordinated efforts, InCommon aims to evolve towards a proactive, data-driven leader that works with the community to shape the future of secure access and collaboration in research and education.