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- 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.).
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