The connected world of business today requires that people perform various tasks culminating in a desired goal while having different responsibilities. The level of complexity creates problems for anyone managing access to various systems. Roles, being a collection of permissions to be assigned to users, are being used to manage the complexity.

Design of roles is fast becoming a subject of interest in both the academic and corporate world for obvious reasons. Every organization attempts to perform its own exercise, due to the fact that they all have different functional needs and structures. The attempt is made mainly as a bottom-up or top-down exercise. It must be understood that role design is not an activity; it is a process which keeps evolving. The changes can occur due to corporate restructuring or business demands.

In both cases, the roles can be structured in multi-level hierarchies to represent business and technical capabilities. These levels can depend on the complexity of the existing system and the number of functionalities that needs to be assigned; the bigger the size of the business, the greater the number of roles and levels. Read more