A University manager wishing to enable staff to do a job should be able to activate such privileges together, without needing detailed knowledge of the set of privileges involved nor having to handle them separately. The Authority Service accomplishes this by providing several layers of abstraction in which specific system privileges are recorded as non-system specific entitlements , which can be grouped together into tasks , then further managed as groups of tasks that describe job functions . Finally, job functions can be assigned to organizational roles rather than to individuals to facilitate the assignment of authority as people move in and out of a specific role. Roles These are not a component of the Authority system per se, but a valuable affordance supported by the Organizational Registry. Typical or common roles can be created as department level data and their definition shaped through the assigning of suitable functions.
Roles then become a reusable authority profile.
They do not describe a job in its entirety as a person may be assign more than one roles as part of their job. Functions Functions represent common administrative activities of a department, division or other University organization. They are meant to describe that part of administrative activities that apply to authority and privilege requirements of online systems. Thus they reflect real world activities but do not define them. We hope that a well thought out group of functions will meet the majority of authority requirements in our business systems.