Darren has posted up about the need for a single-sign-on capability to support information portals now and into the future. He linked to this keynote on Identity 2.0 by Dick Hardt, the founder and CEO of Sxip (pronounced Skip) Identity. The presentation itself is captivating but the concepts he is talking about are extremely powerful and speaks to some of the posts I have written in the past about identity and access control.
I think anyone who proports to be in the identity management business (hint: thats you system administrators) need to go and watch this presentation and understand what some of the larger issues are beyond what password policy you are going to set up in Active Directory.
Personally I think the inability of the enterprise and vendors to the enterprise to understand and embrace what is being dubbed Identity 2.0 will be what holds back to implementation of innovative new technologies that actually make our lives better.