Scott Loftesness agrees with parts of my Who r u? post but he prefers consumers over users and feels that enterprise market environment is different.  I think it is the same, if not more so.

In the consumer market, who is more important than what.  But in the enterprise market, what is more important than who because each person plays one or more roles.

If I, as an enterprise user, need to communicate with an IT administrator, I am not really interested in knowing who the person is.  I just want something done that an IT adminstrator can handle.  If I send a message to Bob, the admin, at bob@docuverse.com and Bob gets run over by a truck, the message is lost.  But if I sent it to admin@docuverse.com, then I am fine.

Names are still useful for better user experience and context recognition (I told Bob something last week so he should know what I am talking about this week).  But do they have to real names?  What if Bob was just an alias for admin and interaction history is easily accessible using a service that logs past interactions between 'Bob' and I?

The other day, I was thinking about wars in the future.  In one of them, soldiers were robots remotely controlled by kids sitting in front of a game console far away.  The question I was toying with was whether the make up of each squad has to be fixed, meaning each kid is assigned to a squad permanently.  If so, then most if not all the squads will be underpowered when they are deployed.

If kids are assigned as they login, then teamwork is lost because each soldier would not know nor trust others in his/her squad.  The solution I saw was to profile-based on-demand assignment.

Simplified version of the idea is this:

If it walks like Bob and talks like Bob, it's Bob to me.

My apologies if your name happens to be Bob.