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Role Management Software: Making it Work for You

Role management software enables the creation and lifecycle management of enterprise job roles

DO look for a tool that mirrors your organizational approach. It's important to ensure that the tool you choose is consistent with your organization's approach to structuring roles. For instance, when Cooper chose Vaau (before it was acquired by Sun), he felt it provided the flexibility he needed to provide not just primary roles but also sub-roles and out-of-role requests for temporary projects.

DON'T underestimate the time commitment. Implementers agree that role management is a multiyear effort. Having started in December 2007, Energy East predicts it will have role templates in place for more than 40 percent of its 6,000 employees by the end of this year. Harkola expects things to speed up with the implementation of Courion's Role Courier.

Cooper says he's spent almost his entire career at Thrivent on role management, with the effort starting in 2006. By the end of this year, he expects to have roles created across the majority of the organization, and 20 percent of the company's application portfolio will be integrated into the system. The most time-consuming piece, according to Cooper, is the communication, analysis and research required to get businesspeople on board and ensure your initial design is correct. The good news, he says, is that the learning curve drops off, and you can leverage process improvements and reuse definitions. While it took 12 weeks to set up roles for Thrivent's first business unit, the team is now completing units in six weeks.

But all in all, "the work effort is probably more than you anticipate, and you need to have a dedicated team," Shumard warns. Particularly thorny areas for Cigna included workflow, communication and getting role managers involved.

DO manage scope. Shumard says it's important to create a road map to best understand your goals, pain points and what you want to address first. And because of the time and cost involved, companies like Thrivent have honed the number of applications it will include in its role management system, choosing to focus first on its financially significant privacy applications, which make up 10 percent of its portfolio. "In a lot of our applications, less than a dozen people have access," Cooper says. "In cases like that, it doesn't make sense to apply $15,000 or $50,000 to integrate that application with the system."

DO consider getting a quick start with role mining. Role mining is becoming more common in full-featured role management systems. It's a feature that looks for established patterns, which users then interpret to define roles, eliminating 25 percent to 40 percent of the legwork that used to exist, according to Perry Carpenter, an analyst at Gartner. In this way, it can be used to show value quickly. Software provider Eurekify is well-known for its role-mining capabilities, and built its system on top of an analytic engine, but even companies that came into the market from an audit or compliance background are doing role mining now.