...
- Budget Access by Director and Assistant - Sarah is the new Director of Facilities Management. As the Director, she has the authority within the institutional ERP system to manage the access rights afforded to other individuals with respect to fund codes within Facilities Management. The Director wishes to have her administrative assistant process monthly budget reconciliation statements for her non-salary fund codes, but wishes to manage her salary fund codes directly. She explicitly grants her administrative assistant access to read and reconcile transactions against her non-salary fund codes in the ERP, but leaves herself as the sole individual with access to her salary fund codes. (Single authority identified by organizational hierarchy grants by fiat to single subject multiple privileges on a single target resource constrained by resource scoping)
- Old and New Payroll Clerks - Gina, an administrative assistant in the Department of Chemistry, vacates her position in the department to take a new position in the Office of the Comptroller. Gina has been the department's payroll clerk for a number of years. The department chair chooses his executive assistant, Marcus, to take over as payroll clerk for the department. As payroll clerk, Marcus will need access to sensitive payroll information about non-exempt employees in the department, but will not need access to faculty salary information or student records. The department chair logs into an access management system and designates Marcus as the new payroll clerk for the Department of Chemistry. In so doing, he grants Marcus a collection of rights within various financial applications appropriate for a departmental payroll clerk in his department, and Gina (who is still employed by the university and still recognized by the authorization system as a user) has her payroll clerk privileges for the Chemistry department revoked. (Single authority identified organizational hierarchy grants multiple related privileges collected by role on multiple target resources to single subject and revokes mulitple related privileges collected by role on multiple target resources from single subject)
- Clery Notification - Richard is the institutions Vice President of Public Safety, and as such, he is authorized within an emergency notification system to approve Clery Act notifications which will be sent via multiple venues to the entire campus community. Richard schedules a two week vacation in Europe. He delegates his Clery role to the Chief of Campus Police, Trish, during his two week absence, allowing her to approve Clery notices in his stead. When a pair or armed robberies is reported outside a student dormitory one week later, Trish is able to approve a Clery notification for distribution on Richard's behalf. Upon his return from vacation, Richard revokes the delegation of his Clery role, and Trish loses her ability to approve Clery notices in the system. (Single authority identified by organizational hierarchy transfers privileges by fiat to a single subject designee on a single resource constrained by an absolute time limit)
- Wellness Program Participation - A university's HR department offers a health and wellness program for university staff and faculty. The program is entirely voluntary. Participation requires a commitment by the employee to engage in a short online health awareness exercise, in return for which the university offers participants discounts on services at the university health club as well as periodic special offers from area business deemed by the university to be offering wellness-supporting services. A new employee in the physical plant hears about the program during an HR orientation and visits a web site to sign up. Once enrolled in the program, the employee has access to the program's web portal and receives weekly email reminders about training opportunities and special offers. (Multiple subjects act as authorities self-selecting to opt themselves into multiple privileges on multiple, federated target resources with affiliation and prerequisite constraints.)
- Travel Reimbrsement Approvals - Business rules within a college require that travel reimbursements in excess of $1,500 per diem be approved by the traveler's immediate supervisor or someone in the supervisor's management chain and countersigned by an agent from the college's Accounting office. Martha, the Assistant Director of International Relations, returns from a business trip to Switzerland and files a travel reimbursement form attesting to $1,800 in expenses on the final day of the trip. The reimbursements system routes his last day's request to the Director, who approves it in the system. The system then routes the approved request to the Accounting office, where it is checked by a member of the Accounting office's travel reimbursements team. Only after the expense report is authorized by the Accounting office does the system issue a reimbursement check to Martha for the $1,800.(Multiple authorities identified programmatically by business roles participate in hierarchical workflow to approve single privilege on single target resource for single subject with sizing constraint)
- Housekeeping's Access to Services - The Housekeeping Office decides to do away with their legacy paper-based PTO (Paid Time Off) tracking system and begin using an online PTO system managed by the central IT group on campus. The new system provides, among other features, a combined calendar view of staff time off, holidays, and major campus events (so that employees may make more informed decisions about vacation scheduling). The system accesses group information derived from authoritative sources in HR and Payroll to associate individuals with their departments, and grants access to department-limited views of the combined calendar to all employees in each department. When Housekeeping begins using the online system, staff in the department are automatically granted access to a Housekeeping view of the combined calendar, listing the schedules of employees in Housekeeping along with University-wide events and holidays. As new employees arrive in the department, they are automatically added to the appropriate departmental group and gain access to the departmental calendar in the PTO system.
- Enforcing Compliance Training - The University Compliance Office requires that all employees in specific job categories identified as having potential interaction with sensitive financial information (such as employee bank routing information or staff payroll information) complete an online training module on current procedures for securing sensitive information and attest to their agreement to follow documented University regulations. The system stores information in the institutional identity management repository indicating the date when an employee last completed the online training module, and periodically sends notices to individuals whose training is more than one year out of date and who still work in covered job categories. The training system grants access to the module automatically to employees whose IdM data indicate that they meet the criteria for completing the instructional module. Other applications that traffic in sensitive financial information include the currency of employee's training when making authorization decisions.
- Trustee's Conflict of Interest - The Trustees share access to a secure wiki site where information regarding major capital projects being undertaken by the University is housed and discussed. One member of the board notices that in an upcoming meeting there will be a discussion of possible plans to sell some University land at auction to raise funding for a new building project. As a member of the local zoning commission, the Trustee must recuse himself from the discussion. The University secretary explicitly revokes the Trustee's access to the specific portion of the wiki related to the discussion of the real estate transaction in order to avoid any appearance of conflict.
- Terminating Access for a Disgruntled Employee - A Systems Administrator in the Computer Science department is terminated abruptly for egregious violation of University harassment regulations. When the employee is terminated, University policy states that his access to core services and systems must be terminated within 48 hours, and automated processes are in place to ensure compliance with that policy by removing the employee's access to systems throughout the institution. The automatic processes are triggered as overnight batch processes in order to avoid possible service interruptions during normal business hours. The Chair of the CS department, however, has reason to believe that the terminated employee may intend to do some mischief before his access is disabled, so to protect departmental systems, he contacts the IT Security Officer (ITSO) and requests an exceptional authorization change. The ITSO logs into a privileging system and, using rights granted to him by his functional role as ITSO, places an administrative block on all privileges afforded to the terminated employee, and triggers an immediate update of access rules on core systems and CS Departmental systems. Three hours later, the terminated employee attempts to log into the CS department's mail server and delete his accuser's account, but is denied access due to the ITSO's manual override. Overnight, the nightly batch run removes the user's access rights in all systems, making the ITSO's manual override unnecessary. The next morning the ITSO removes his manual override from the system.
- Special Access for New Employee - A new software engineer is hired by the Administrative Computing group. His addition to the staff automatically provisions him with an electronic identity and with access to some common productivity tools, etc., shared by all staff members. On his first day at work, his manager logs into an access management interface and adds the new employee to a group constructed to identify programmers working on a new Purchasing system. This automatically provisions with the new engineer with read access to the code repository for the Purchasing system, but does not automatically grant him write access to the repository. The first time the new engineer attempts to commit changes to the code repository, a workflow is triggered which notifies the project manager overseeing the coding project. The project manager reviews the new engineer's credentials and his attempted change, and determines that the new engineer should be granted commit rights in the repository. Once the project manager authorizes his commit rights, the new engineer is able to modify code within the Purchasing system.
- Budget Approval Process - A University budgeting system implements an hierarchy-based policy for budgetary approvals, in which budgets for organizational subunits are submitted by their respective managers and approved by their department heads, who in turn submit their combined budgets (along with their own offices' discretionary budgets) for approval to school or divisional managers, who in turn pass their combined budgets to senior administrators and ultimately to the CFO for approval. The scope of budget approval authority granted any given manager in the system is controlled by the organizational unit the manager is charged with overseeing. The authority who must approve any given manager's budget is dictated by the organizational hierarchy, which is represented in the system with hierarchical groupings of subunits, departments, and divisions. In the event that a given approver is unavailable for any reason, any authority at a point closer to the top of the hierarchy may issue approvals in his or her stead. When the Director of Transportation is out on childcare leave during budget finalization, it falls to the Assistant VP of Auxiliaries to approve both the Director's discretionary budget and the budgets of her subordinate managers for the Parking Office, the Campus Transit Authority, and the Traffic Control Office.
- Budget Approval for New Department - At that same University, the budgeting system eventually encounters a new interdisciplinary program in Genomics that comprises faculty and staff from a number of different departments spanning multiple schools and colleges. The Program Director submits budget into the system, but since the program is not part of any officially recognized school or division, the Director's budget is routed all the way to the Provost for approval.
- Employee RIF - An employee is separated from the institution due to a RIF (Reduction In Force) in her department. HR rules require that she retain access to the campus HR portal and to career development resources for 90 days following her separation to facilitate her transition into a new position (whether internal or external). The campus access management system notices her separation and removes her from all active employee groups and roles, thus denying her access to most staff-accessible systems on campus. She is automatically granted specific access to the HR portal and the career center library system for 90 days. At the end of the 90-day grace period, her rights in those two systems automatically expire.
- Inappropriate Purchase with Institutional Funds - An incident involving the possible misuse of a University purchasing card to acquire an item of jewelry is being investigated by Internal Audit. The investigator requests a report from the purchasing system of when and by whom the specific purchase was approved, and finds that the purchase was approved by an administrative assistant with authority to approve purchases only up to $500. The investigator then retrieves a report from the access management system of all privileges previously assigned to the administrative assistant, and finds that on the date the purchase was approved, the employee was granted approval rights up to $5,000 for a period of four hours. The investigator notes in the audit log that the assistant's manager - the Assistant Director of Finance - had granted those rights to her. After further investigation, it is determined that the Assistant Director had granted those rights to her assistant in violation of University regulations, and had then directed her to approve the purchase in an attempt to avoid its being detected by the auditors. Both the Assistant Director and her assistant undergo disciplinary action as a result of the incident.
- Affiliation Transitioning - A staff member in the Accounting office applies for admission to the graduate program in Mathematics and is accepted. Three months into her graduate program, she decides to vacate her position in Accounting and become a full-time graduate student. When she transitions out of her Accounting position, her access rights to the university ledger and other financial accounting systems are revoked automatically, but as a continuing student, her university ID, her university electronic identity, and her common services accounts (email, scheduling, collaborative applications) remain active, as do her student services (access to the campus LMS, access to the Bursar's bill tracking system, etc.).
...
- Off-campus Colleague Access to Local Research Results - Professor Smith, of the Department of Pharmacology in the Medical School, is researching the chemistry of snake venom to determine whether certain components of various snakes' venom may be useful in the management of chronic pain. Professor Jones, in the Department of Genetics, has recently completed a mapping of the genome of one particular species of cobra, and after reading an article by Professor Smith on that cobra's venom, offers to share his research results with him. Professor Jones explicitly grants access to his cobra genetics notes in the Genetics Faculty wiki to Professor Smith, who uses Professor Jones' research to further his analysis of the components of the particular cobra's venom.
- Adding a Lab Assistant - A faculty member in the Department of Physics arranges to have one of his better undergraduate students from the previous semester act as a lab assistant for his structural dynamics class. He adds the "lab instructor" role for Physics 108 to the student's profile in the learning management system (LMS) and the student automatically gains access to lab teaching materials and student lab reports for the course.
- TA Grade Access - A university uses its LMS to handle mid-term grade reporting - faculty enter grades for assignments and mid-term quizzes and exams in the LMS, where students can review them online and track their progress until the end of the term. The LMS automatically assigns grade entry privileges to instructors (as identified by the student registration system). Professor Gamow chooses to have one of his graduate students act as TA for his EM Fields course and delegates his grade reporting privileges in the LMS to his student. The student is then able to report grades for students in the EM Fields class within the LMS. When final grades are due, Professor Gamow reports them to the Registrar based on information previously reported in the LMS.
- Resource Owners Managing Access Data - A university's central IT organization operates an authorization service used by all its colleges and schools to manage access rights within a shared faculty management application. Central IT staff find themselves spending increasing time entering role and permission changes on behalf of the schools. Central IT staff use a delegation mechanism built into the authorization facility to grant administrative staff in each School direct access to authorization rules for resources within their Schools, relieving them of workload and distributing decision-making authority to resource owners.
- FERPA Information Restricted - Under federal regulations, certain educational records information about studnets may be categorized as "directory information" and may be disclosed by institutions without prior consent from students. Students reserve the right under FERPA, however, to have disclosure of their directory information blocked upon request. An undergraduate Engineer becomes concerned that a high-school acquaintance may be stalking her, and wishes to have her contact information (name, address, email address, telephone number) blocked from view. The university considers those data elements to be directory information under FERPA, and discloses them by default. The student visits a FERPA portal system and marks those data elements as FERPA protected information in her records. Subsequently, applications that access student educational information and IdM data about students refuse to allow access to the student's contact information except when the requester is identified as having an academic need to see the information.
- Course Registration Exceptions - A Biomedical Engineering (BME) student in her senior year signs up for Professor Jones' popular seminar on biomedical research ethics. As a BME upperclassman, the registration system allows her to sign up directly. Her roommate, a pre-med student majoring in Public Policy, attempts to sign up for the same course, but because of rules applied to the course in the registration system, the second student's registration for the course is suspended, and the system sends an approval report to Professor Jones. Having spoken with the student beforehand, the professor is prepared for the request, and authorizes it in the registration system. The pre-med student is enrolled in the class.
- Restricted-Blog Access - Professor Pilkey wants to grant access to a blog he maintains about his research into the effects of pollution on shallow-water marine invertebrates to students in his Wetlands Ecology course. The campus IdM system automatically places students in course-specific groups based on their enrollment in specific sections of specific courses. The blogging software supports LDAP-based groups, so Professor Pilkey grants access to his blog to the members of the "ECO 212 Students" group.
- Course Deadline Extented - A student in Dr. Schonfeld's Ordinary Differential Equations course is unable to attend the final exam due to an authorized absence (a death in her family). Professor Schonfeld has removed access in the LMS to her class notes for the prior semester's students, since the semester is at an end, but she makes an exception for the student at the request of the Dean, and grants her access to the course space in the LMS for an additional week in order to complete studying for the make-up exam. One week later, the student's access is automatically removed by the system.
- Career Services - Career Counseling Services arranges to have an online course in effective interviewing techniques made available to students who meet specific criteria - those who are expected to graduate within one year and who are in degree-seeking programs (part-time and inter-institutional students are excluded). The vendor providing the online course materials requires that the center make a good faith effort to limit access to those students. The center arranges to grant access to any student whose expected date of graduation is less than one year in the future and whose identity information indicates she is a full-time student.
- Adding TA Access to Course Dropbox - In a shared filespace, a faculty member desires to grant read access to course materials to both his students and his TAs, write-only access to a dropbox or his students, and read-only access to the dropbox for his TAs. The file server consumes group information from the identity management system to enable the faculty member to grant read to the course materials for his students, but because only the faculty member knows the identity of his TAs, he manually adds the TAs one by one to an access whitelist for the shared filespace.
- Faculty Survey Access - A faculty member in Education working for the Provost's office on a multi-year effort to enhance undergraduate instruction is researching the effectiveness of different pedagogical strategies in the treaching of new foreign languages to non-language majors. He develops a survey which he wants instructors teaching introductory language classes in all foreign language departments to respond to. He grants permission to access the survey to faculty members and graduates students identified as instructors in at least one section of a 0-level foreign language course. The Registrar later grants him access to depersonalized grade information from 0-level foreign language classes to complete his research.
- Approval of Faculty Promotions - A web-based faculty management and promotion system needs to grant access to faculty CVs and evaluations in a way that reflects the institutional academic hierarchy. Professor Jones is both an instructor in the department of Microbiology and the Chair of the department. As a department chair, Professor Jones has access both to his own CV and to the CVs and evaluations of all faculty within the department. Professor Johnson is the Dean of Basic Sciences, and teaching faculty in the Anatomy department. Because Microbiology is part of the Division of Basic Sciences, Dean Johnson has access to professor Jones' CV and evaluation reports, as well as to all the CVs and evaluations of faculty in Microbiology and other departments within the division. She has access to her own CV as a faculty member, but not to the CVs of faculty in other parts of the School of Medicine. Dean Hillard is the Dean of Medicine, and has access to all faculty information in the School.
- Access to Course Resources - Professor Hausmann teaches four sections of Basic Anatomy in the Medical School, one of which is cross-listed in Comparative Biology and co-taught by Professor Biggs. In conjunction with an LMS system, the university provides shared filespace for instructors to use in their courses. By default, instructors are given one shared directory for each course they teach and one subdirectory for each section of each course. Professor Hausmann is granted full privileges in a top-level shared directory for his Basic Anatomy course (BA4401) and in subdirectories for each of the four sections of the cours (BA4401S1 thru BA4401S4). Students in each section are given read access to the BA4401 directory and to their individual sectional subdirectories, but not to other sectional subdirectories. Professor Biggs is automatically granted full access to the BA4401S4 subdirectory, which is also referenced through a filesystem link as CBIO410S1. Students enrolled in the cross list have access to the one subdirectory and the BA4401 super-directory.
- Requsisite Training for Lab Access - A new graduate student matriculates in Biochemistry and as a result is granted card access to the Chemistry and Biology buildings and all departmental areas except a Class 2 pathogen lab in the basement of the Biology building. Access to that lab is contingent upon completion of a rigorous course in safe handling of Class 2 human pathogens and the operation of the labs safety equipment. The graduate student completes the course a week after matriculation and once the occupational health and safety office updates his IdM information to indicate that he is in compliance with the requirement, his card grants him access to the lab automatically. Six months later, his compliance comes due for renewal, and he's notified that he must complete a refresher course to continue his access to the lab. Having completed the only course involving use of the Class 2 lab he plans to take, he chooses not to renew his certification, and as it lapses, his card access to the lab is revoked.
- Student Registration Glitch - Professor Stedman's Marketing 304 course culminates in a final project which is to be submitted electronically by each student no later than 5pm on the last day of class. A student in the class fails to submit his final project on time and reports that he was denied access to the class dropbox when he attempted to submit his assignment. The instructor is suspicious and retrieves audit logs from the LMS which indicate that the student was indeed denied access to the dropbox at 4:45 on the appointed day. Enlisting the assistance of his IT support staff, Professor Stedman finds that the student was removed from the Marketing 304 Student group that morning, and reinstated in the group the following morning. Further investigation by the IT staff determines that a failure in the university registration system had caused truncation of the student list for Marketing 304 and caused the student in question to be errantly reported as not enrolled in the course for approximately 24 hours. In light of these facts, Professor Stedman grants the student an extension and allows the student to submit his final project for full credit.
- Colleague Submitting Grades for Another - Professor Jones in the School of Engineering is planning to attend an IEEE event in Switzerland and will be unavailable for three weeks at the end of the semester. She has arranged to have final grades for all of her students completed prior to her departure, but due to restrictions set by the Registrar's grade reporting system, she can't enter the grades officially until after the semester ends. She arranges for a colleague (Professor Wilson) to enter her grades for her, and in order to enable this, transfers her rights with respect to her Signals course to her colleague, limiting the transfer to the specific range of dates during which she will be in Switzerland. When the time comes for grade reporting Professor Wilson is able to post Professor Jones' Signals grades on her behalf. Three weeks later, Professor Wilson accidentally attempts to open Professor Jones' grade report for her Signals class and is denied access by the grading system, since Professor Jones' transfer of authority has expired.
- Pre-hire vs. Post-Hire Affiliation - Normal HR processes ensure that new employees and faculty are automatically provisioned with electronic identities and granted appropriate access to services based on their roles within the organization on the morning of their first official day at work. Dr. Zalib Bentha is the world's foremost authority on the lasing behavior of gallium-based solid-state lasers, and has just accepted a position in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department at the University. His effective date in the position is six months hence, but because of the importance of his hiring to the School of Engineering and his interest in beginning to build collaborations before his arrival, the Dean of the School makes an urgent request to have soon-to-be Professor Bentha provisioned for access to the University e-mail system and the School's collaborative wiki system. Staff in the electronic access management group follow a pre-defined procedure to enroll Dr. Bentha in the University identity management system as a special "pre-hire affiliate". He is automatically issued an electronic ID, but is not populated in any specific user groups. His pre-hire status grants him automatic access to and provisioning for the University email system, but does not give him access to departmental resources. As part of the pre-hire workflow, the Dean's office is notified when Dr. Bentha's identity is created, and staff in the Dean's office explicitly grant him access to the Engineering wiki system. Six months later, when Professor Bentha begins his tenure at the school, the normal HR process adds him to various faculty groups and removes his pre-hire affiliate status and associated "special" privileges. The Professor arrives on his first day in the department and sees no interruption in his existing access to services.
- Delegated Directory Administration - Bill is one of three IT administrators in the Department of Chemistry within the College of Arts and Sciences. As part of his departmental duties, he manages both Windows-based desktops on faculty and graduate student desks and a cluster of Windows-based fileservers. His systems are all joined to an enterprise Active Directory domain which also incorporates user objects for all the university affiliates in the enterprise identity management system. Due to disk space exhaustion, Bill needs to relocate the home directories of roughly half of his faculty from their current fileserver to a new fileserver. He migrates the relevant data, and then needs to update attribute information in the enterprise AD regarding the path to his faculty members' home directories. His status as an IT admin in the department confers on him the ability to update the homeDirectory and homeDrive attributes for users in his departmental OU within the central AD, and he successfully updates his faculty members' information using standard Microsoft tools. Later, when Bill mistakenly attempts to update one of his faculty member's msExchgHomeServerName values, he is prevented from saving the change, since his rights as an IT administrator in the department do not extend to overriding the campus IDM systems' selection of an Exchange home server for his users. Still later, while Bill is vacationing in the Swiss Alps, his departmental fileserver is destroyed in a machine room mishap, and the faculty whose home directories were moved must be restored from tape to yet another server. In Bill's absence, Patrick, who works for the College's IT administration, is able to use his college-wide privileges as an IT admin to update the same homeDirectory and homeDrive attributes for Bill's faculty. When, upon his return from Switzerland, Bill takes a position as a departmental support manager in another department, his privileges regarding Chemistry faculty attributes are automatically revoked.
Residential Life Use Cases
| Anchor | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
...