Roles and Delegation of Authority (R/DA) System

The processes of defining managerial roles and providing for delegation of authority are essential to any enterprise. At most large organizations, these processes are defined in policy manuals and through sets of standard operating procedures for many, if not all, business and administrative functions. Many of these staff-initiated, administrative functions require the routing of documents for approval to one or more levels of management. These employee-oriented, back office types of workflows tend to require more flexibility in determining to whom these documents should go to, while, at the same time, providing the responsible parties with the flexibility to delegate their approval authority or allow others to review their work. Although this practice is commonplace in manual, paper-based processes that exist in many organizations, it is difficult to provide the same flexibility in the more structured, electronic-based, workflow systems. The purpose of this report is to present a framework or architecture for creating a R/DA system and provide some insights associated with its design and utilization. To improve understanding and clarify subsequent discussion, the goals and requirements for the major R/DA system components, namely, the database and interface modules, are initially presented along with the identification of important concepts and the definition of critical terms. Next high-level functions relating the types of inputs to the outputs of the R/DA interface module are introduced and discussed. Then the relationships between the major R/DA modules and the primary components associated with its creation and maintenance are presented and analyzed. Finally, some conclusions are drawn relative to the advantages associated with developing a R/DA system for use in implementing an enterprise-wide, work-facilitating information system