Digital identity architecture for Alberta and Canadian governments
DSarchitek Inc., based in Okotoks, Alberta, designs how governments recognise a person: which record is official, how the person proves who they are, and what the person controls.
Three questions, kept apart
- Canonical identifier
- Which record is the person's official one, and which program is responsible for it.
- Authentication identifier
- How the person proves who they are when they sign in or apply for a service.
- Citizen-controlled identity
- What the person holds and controls themselves, such as credentials in a digital wallet.
Many digital identity projects start from one technology, such as a sign-in service or a wallet, and let it answer all three questions at once. The official record then depends on one way of signing in, and later changes become slow and expensive. The practice designs an answer to each question separately, so a technology choice does not quietly decide all three.
What the practice does
- Identifier strategy for ministries, programs and public bodies.
- Identity resolution designs that build one reliable person record across programs that each kept their own.
- Life-event models that follow a person through government, from birth registration to estate settlement.
- Privacy design for identity data: who may see it, and what AI tools may and may not do with it.
- Indigenous data governance where the collective rights of Nations apply to the records.
Work behind it
On a Canadian provincial registries program, the practice designed the life-event model across nine registries and the identity resolution design for a single person record across them.
At Alberta Health Services, the principal led the policy that defines the information making up Alberta's Comprehensive Patient Record through to provincial adoption, and designed the information architecture for the MyHealthAlberta.ca patient portal. The full list is on the Record page.