Defence of dissertation in the field of computer science, MSc Anar Bazarhanova

Title of the dissertation is "Managing change in a dominant infrastructure for digital identification"

Digital identity management (IdM) is a crucial aspect in any software system that needs to identify, authenticate and authorize the access of its users. It is an important step towards the digitalization of societies and the success and wide adoption of an IdM system is dependent on many factors: the solutions should be technically sound, scalable, economically viable, user-friendly and also recognize broad cross-domain integration aspects. Thus, the challenge of building and managing a large-scale IdM system is an integration problem that ranges from infrastructural, system-level integrations, to higher-level strategic, business, liability and trust aspects.

The goal of this thesis is to identify the factors that affect the changes in dominant digital infrastructures and the problem is observed through the case of an IdM infrastructure in Finland. The Finnish BankID (TUPAS) ecosystem has a 30-year long history of a proprietary system as the de facto strong electronic identification method both in e-government and private sector services. The transformation of the Finnish IdM ecosystem in compliance with local (Finnish Trust Network) and EU (eIDAS) regulatory changes provides a unique case of the digital infrastructure’s wide adoption followed by its sustained nationwide dominance and a forced transformation. The results help to explain the dependence on external dominant infrastructures and to derive theory-advised instructions for the governance of IdM infrastructures from both technology and organizational perspectives.

Opponent: Professor Marko Seppänen, Tampere University, Finland

Custos: Professor Kari Smolander, Aalto University School of Science, Department of Computer Science

Contact information of the doctoral candidate: Anar Bazarhanova, Aalto University School of Science, Department of Computer Science, [email protected], +358 46 9519364

The public defense will be organized via remote technology (Zoom). Link to the online public defence: https://aalto.zoom.us/j/64652125712Zoom Quick Guide: https://www.aalto.fi/en/services/zoom-quick-guide

The dissertation will be publicly displayed online 10 days before the defence at https://aaltodoc.aalto.fi/doc_public/eonly/riiputus/?lang=enElectronic dissertation: https://aaltodoc.aalto.fi/handle/123456789/44024