I sometimes find it hard to understand why we don't have better identity management solutions given the pain we and the organizations we work for suffer. Sure, there are some initiatives which may help but none that is going to be widely deployed today or tomorrow. From the Financial Times:

Industry experts say that companies spend $100 a year per employee alone on manually creating and resetting passwords. Meanwhile the average company has over 100 different direcetories in which identity management information is stored. IBM estimates that up to 60 per cent of company access profiles are orphaned accounts (for example employees who have left the company or changed jobs) creating serious security gaps. [Paul Taylor. Managing the digital identity crisis. FT IT Review. July 27 2005]