Spherical Cow Consulting

Heather Flanagan
June 24, 2025January 13, 2026
Deep Thoughts, Podcast

Rethinking Digital Identity: What ARE Open Standards?

Since I wrote last week about MCP and the need for a more structured standards development process, this week I feel like diving into what it means to build an open standard. Unfortunately, "open standard" is a term that often gets thrown around and means entirely too many different things.

The process idea for moving MCP from a defacto standard to a reviewed standard.

Heather Flanagan
June 17, 2025January 13, 2026
Industry Ideas, Podcast

The MCP Bandwagon

MCP is 'an open protocol that standardizes how applications provide context to LLMs.' If we’re moving toward a world where AIs are expected to do All The Things, interfacing with our applications and services, then having a universal adapter that lets AIs talk to everything is undeniably powerful.

Heather Flanagan
June 3, 2025January 13, 2026
Deep Thoughts, Podcast

Acting on Behalf of Others: Delegation, Consent, and Messy Reality

Most digital systems were built around a simple model: one user, one identity, one device, one intent. If you need more than that, that's what password sharing is for, right? (Note: that was sarcasm.) Who needs delegation? Reality, which has definitely included sharing passwords, has always been messier.

Governance in Decentralization: Why Trust, Not Tech, Determines What Works; Social Media Network Background Relations

Heather Flanagan
May 27, 2025January 13, 2026
Deep Thoughts, Podcast

Why Governance Decides If Decentralization Works

The tech is ready for decentralization. The governance is not. This is the final post in a four-part series exploring decentralization not as a buzzword, but as a series of hard tradeoffs that digital infrastructure teams, architects, and strategy leads must navigate.

Finding your way out of the centralization vs decentralization maze; 3d Render Circle Shape Metal Maze illuminated with Pink Blue and Orange lights (Depth of Field)

Heather Flanagan
May 20, 2025January 13, 2026
Deep Thoughts, Podcast

Redefining Success: Centralization as a Feature or a Failure?

What if centralized dominance is just what success looks like in our current system? Today, I want to take a step back and ask: Why is it so hard to justify decentralization in the first place? What are we really rewarding when we call a system “successful”?

Let's talk about the cost of decentralization

Heather Flanagan
May 13, 2025January 13, 2026
Podcast

The Cost of Decentralization: What Companies Need to Weigh Before They Commit

It’s easy to say you want more control over your systems. But the cost of decentralization in money, complexity, and overhead can hit hard when the invoice arrives. This week, we’re taking that one step further: If flexibility or even malleability is the goal, how much are you willing to pay for it?

centralized vs decentralized architectures are more like frenemies in the enterprise

Heather Flanagan
May 7, 2025January 13, 2026
Podcast

Engineering Meets Economics: Shifting, Not Choosing, Between Centralized and Decentralized

What if the real innovation is not centralization vs decentralization, but the ability to shift between them? It stops being about camps or philosophies—centralized vs decentralized—and starts being about resilience. Adaptability. Survivability. Malleability. The real stuff that makes or breaks systems under pressure.

Heather Flanagan
May 5, 2025January 13, 2026
Podcast

Trailer

Welcome to A Digital Identity Digest, an audio companion to my weekly blog. This podcast provides summaries of timely identity policy, AI, and internet topics, about what’s changing and why it matters. Join me each week for new episodes.

Web payments and digital identity are combining for a safer shopping experience

Heather Flanagan
April 29, 2025April 29, 2025
Hot Takes

Web Payments and Digital Identity are Having a Moment

For a long time, logging into a website was (perhaps still is) a bit of a mess. There’s definitely been many efforts to fix it, and though OAuth buttons and SSO integrations tried to clean things up, under the hood, “Sign in with…” is mostly a best-effort dance. You can authenticate a user, maybe even

NHI governance must account for a sprawl of information. Artwork depicting Globe viewing from space at night with flight routes between cities. (World Map Courtesy of NASA: https://visibleearth.nasa.gov/view.php?id=55167)

Heather Flanagan
April 22, 2025April 13, 2025
Industry Ideas

Who Owns the Bots? Rethinking Governance for Non-Human Identities

Not that long ago, non-human identities (NHIs) were governed by neglect; provisioned manually, tied to a cron job or batch script, maybe mentioned in a change ticket, and rarely touched again. No formal lifecycle, no regular reviews, and certainly no clear ownership. If you remembered to rotate the password once a year, you were ahead