Role Mapping?

[Forum Admin]

Assuming that we are moving down the line with the idea local model changes are facilitated through open role exchange, one of the issues that's sure to come up is role mapping.  This means providing a capability that supports the relating of RBAC elements between system definitions.  Further assuming that collaborating systems are likely to want to keep their own local names for shared roles (or at least allow for a friendly-name type deal), should we formalize this in the proposed exchange standard ?

[rgrapes]

I believe that we must define this area. Many products, including ours, include a rudimentary RBAC mechanism to support our standalone or SMB customer needs. But for larger organizations we recognize the need for either an authoritative source of aggregated/correlated role information (good for new deployments or migrations) or the flexibility to map that to an existing internal source of identity and role (good for existing implementations). As a product company I'd like to be able to draw the line between the pieces we need to develop and those that we can draw from other systems. 

[OIBAC]

It really possible to map roles in the same organisation.
Managers who merge groups of employees during a re-organization do it.

I've participated to two projects of reorganisation in the 90's.
It was necessary to define, first, what a role means on terms of business. 

We used a Top Down methodology and to map first of the various activities and business processes.
It was a tricky task that leaded us to define an enterprise glossary of business terms.

Some other aspects should be considered :
- cultural aspects of management that drive business to be managed with a functional, a transversal, a vertical, a matricial or a "MarshMallow" structure,
- operational and HR policies,
- historic legacy,
- ...

At the end, participants shared a common language on Organisation (structures), Business (processes and activities) and Responsibilities (roles) and it was possible to map roles and to distinguish some specific variables.

My conclusion if you want to map roles in the same org or between different orgs... learn how to analyze the various aspects of a multinational corporation and how to represent its real organisational model.
The understanding of operational responsibilities becomes very clear.