I’ve always been a history buff. There’s something about looking back — tracing how ideas evolved, how events connected, how people navigated uncertainty without knowing how it would turn out — that helps me make sense of where we are now. So it’s a little ironic that it took me so long to turn that same lens on my own work.
A few weeks ago I was pulling together some thoughts on the intersection of verifiable credentials and workforce analytics, and I found myself reaching back further and further to explain where the idea came from. Past a 2020 post on individual data agency. Past a 2014 TED talk on privacy by design. All the way back to 2013, when I was working in IBM Research on enterprise social network analysis and arguing — in a blog post not so different from this one — that we should measure people by what they do, not what they say.
Thirteen years later, here we are.
I hadn’t quite realized how long I’d been thinking about this, or how directly the work I was doing in 2013 connects to what I believe needs to be built in 2026. The technology changed completely. The core problem didn’t.
So I decided to write it up properly. Not as a technology explainer — there are plenty of those — but as a genuine attempt to trace how an idea develops over time. Where it started. What pushed it forward. What got in the way. And where it seems to be heading now.
Starting next week, I’ll be publishing one post a week — five in total:
Week 1: Ethical AI and self-sovereign identity is trying to solve the same problem
Week 2: Measure me by what I do, not what I say
Week 3: Who does the data serve?
Week 4: The infrastructure gap and how it closed
Week 5: Skills you earn vs. skills you learn
If that sounds like your kind of rabbit hole, follow along. I’d love the company.
Marie Wallace leads the Digital Identity Innovation practice at Accenture. She has been writing about the human side of data at allthingsanalytics.com since 2011. All opinions expressed are her own.
Marie's Ramblings & Ruminations 
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