Kevin Chekov Feeney

Beyond the role model: Organisational modelling in policy based management systems

Knowledge and Data Engineering Group
Department of Computer Science
Trinity College Dublin

In this paper, we discuss recent developments in the field of Policy Based Management (PBM) and Role Based Access Control (RBAC). We postulate that PBM tends towards a total description of an organisation’s operations. We examine the organisational models used in PBM and analyse them from the point of view of organisational theory. We conclude that the current organisational models and engineering methodologies employed in RBAC systems suffer from a simplistic, Taylorist, conception of the organisation. We propose a new approach to modelling organisations for PBM systems. Our approach replaces roles with communities (which may be granted autonomy in specific realms) as the fundamental unit of organisational analysis and integrates them with organisational decision making mechanisms to build a more accurate model of the real-world organisation.