To enable substantial cost savings and improved customer delivery, the US Patent & Trademark Office wanted to implement a single, highly scalable, and secure infrastructure that would support both internal and external applications.

The USPTO implemented an in-house PKI to authenticate attorneys lodging patent applications online.  The Return on Investment is one of the best documented cases in PKI, and is based very simply on savings related to elimination of paperwork.  

The current concentration of effort in Europe on electronic signature standardisation. 

Note that this supercedes the previous EESSI program of work.  

European Electronic Messaging Association (EEMA).  Since 1987 eema has been Europe's leading independent, association for ICT, providing its members with the information they need to remain competitive. To keep in step with industry developments and member requirements, it reinvented itself in 2006, to focus specifically on e-security and digital identity technologies and service. 

On September 6, 2007, Dr. Peter Alterman, Chair of the Federal Public Key Infrastructure Policy Authority (FPKIPA), hosted a group of PKI experts from government and industry to determine:

1.      The strategic direction for the FPKI;

2.      Short-term actions in support of that FPKI strategic direction; and

Executive Summary

Illinois was exploring new territory when it launched its public-key infrastructure program at the turn of the century. But it took an economic recession — and a statewide, belt-tightening information technology consolidation — to finally push PKI into use.

An original whitepaper from the OASIS PKI Technical Committee, in 2005.

Abstract

The Internet2 PKI Labs work to advance the
state of the art in network services for authentication and
authorization. The PKI Labs focus on interoperability and
manageability, trust and delegation models, and scaling in the
technical and human dimensions of PKI.