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About Management Roles

Management Roles in EmpowerID serve as an intermediate layer between job-based Business Roles and the technical entitlements and permissions in external systems. This separation allows organizations to manage access based on activities and tasks rather than rigid job titles, making access governance more flexible and resilient to organizational and technical changes.

What You'll Learn

This article explains what Management Roles are, how they differ from Business Roles, and how EmpowerID's Task-Based RBAC (T-RBAC) model uses them to provide granular, auditable access control. You'll understand when to use Management Roles versus other access management approaches and how they protect business processes from IT system changes.

What Are Management Roles?​

Management Roles are collections of Access Levels bundled together to represent the permissions needed for specific activities or tasks. Unlike Business Roles, which represent job titles or organizational positions, Management Roles focus on what people need to do rather than what they are.

These activity-based roles are organized around tasks and responsibilities rather than job titles, making them highly reusable—they can be combined in different ways to grant appropriate access without creating redundant roles. This flexibility supports not only traditional job functions but also teams, projects, and cross-functional collaborations that don't fit neatly into organizational hierarchies. Most importantly, Management Roles provide technical abstraction, shielding business processes from changes in underlying IT systems.

The Anti-Corruption Layer​

Management Roles act as a protective buffer between business operations and technical infrastructure. When IT systems change—such as migrating from one application to another or restructuring Active Directory—Management Roles ensure that business activities remain unaffected.

Management Roles as Anti-Corruption Layer

Without Management Roles: Changes to technical systems require updating every Business Role that references those systems. If you migrate from one HR system to another, you'd need to modify every job-based role that granted HR access.

With Management Roles: You only update the Management Role that maps to the technical system. Business Roles remain unchanged, and users continue working without interruption. The "HR Data Entry" Management Role simply points to permissions in the new system, and all Business Roles that include it automatically gain the updated access.

This approach dramatically reduces the scope and complexity of IT changes, protecting business continuity.

Management Roles vs. Business Roles​

Understanding the distinction between Management Roles and Business Roles is essential for effective access governance:

AspectBusiness RolesManagement Roles
PurposeRepresent job titles and organizational positionsRepresent activities and tasks
Assignment basisWhat you are (Sales Manager, Engineer)What you do (Create Reports, Manage Accounts)
StabilityRelatively stable, tied to org structureMore dynamic, tied to business processes
ScopeBroader, encompassing all aspects of a jobNarrower, focused on specific activities
Example"Finance Manager" role"Invoice Approval" role

Organizations typically assign Business Roles to employees based on their job title, and those Business Roles contain the appropriate Management Roles for that position's responsibilities.

Task-Based RBAC (T-RBAC)​

EmpowerID uses a specialized implementation of Management Roles called Task-Based RBAC (T-RBAC) to organize access to user interfaces, APIs, workflows, and data. This model breaks access control into three distinct role types that work together to enable specific tasks.

T-RBAC Management Role Model

The Three T-RBAC Role Types​

1. UI/API Management Roles (UI-)

These roles grant access to user interface elements and API endpoints, including pages and navigation menus, user interface controls and components, workflow execution permissions, and the ability to make API calls for data retrieval. For example, the UI-ManageUsers role grants access to the user management interface and related workflows.

2. Data Visibility Management Roles (VIS-)

Visibility roles control what data users can see within a particular scope. They provide visibility to specific object types (users, groups, roles), scoped access to organizational locations, API endpoint permissions for retrieving data, and read-only access to resources. The VIS-AllPeople-Boston role, for instance, allows viewing all people in the Boston location and its child locations.

3. Data Access Management Roles (ACT-)

Action roles authorize specific actions or operations on data. They grant permissions for create, modify, or delete operations, administrative actions on resources, and scoped permissions to perform tasks with write access to specific object types. An example would be ACT-CreateUser-NewYork, which allows creating user accounts in the New York location.

How T-RBAC Roles Work Together​

Users need a combination of these three role types to perform tasks. Having one type without the others results in incomplete access. A user with only a UI role can see the interface but has no data visibility or action permissions. Someone with only a VIS role can see data through APIs but cannot access the UI or perform actions. And a user with only an ACT role can perform actions but cannot see data or access the interface to do so.

Consider the task of creating users in the Boston office. This requires three roles working together: UI-ManageUsers provides access to the user management interface, VIS-AllPeople-Boston grants visibility to Boston users, and ACT-CreateUser-Boston provides permission to create users in Boston. Only with all three can the user successfully complete the task.

This segregation provides granular control and allows roles to be reused in different combinations without creating numerous redundant roles.

When to Use Management Roles​

Management Roles are most appropriate when managing access for specific activities or tasks that span different job functions, supporting project teams or cross-functional collaboration, and isolating business processes from technical system dependencies. They excel at providing granular, auditable access control and implementing least-privilege access based on actual responsibilities rather than job titles. Their reusable nature makes them ideal for creating access patterns that can be combined flexibly as organizational needs evolve.

Business Roles, on the other hand, work best when assigning access based on job titles or organizational positions, implementing organization-wide access policies, managing access for standard employee types, and simplifying access assignment during hiring and role changes.

Most organizations use both approaches together, with Business Roles containing the appropriate Management Roles for each job function. This combination provides the simplicity of job-based assignments with the flexibility of activity-based control, which is the most common and recommended approach for comprehensive access governance.

Management Role Structure​

Management Roles in EmpowerID are fully manageable objects that can contain Access Levels (collections of operations and rights for specific resource types), nested Management Roles bundled within for hierarchical permissions, ownership and governance settings with designated responsible parties and deputies, membership policies that enable automatic assignment based on organizational attributes, and location scoping that restricts where the role's permissions apply.

Management Role Definitions​

Management Roles can be created from Management Role Definitions, which serve as templates containing a baseline set of Access Levels. Multiple Management Roles can inherit from a single definition, providing several key advantages. This inheritance allows for consistent baseline permissions across similar roles and centralized management of common access patterns. Organizations can create regional variants with location-specific scoping while still maintaining a common foundation, and child roles can be customized through additional Access Levels beyond what the definition provides.

For example, an "IT Administrator" definition might contain 345 Access Levels for general IT admin tasks. Regional roles such as London IT Admin and New York IT Admin inherit these 345 Access Levels and add location-specific assignments scoped to their respective regions, eliminating the need to manage hundreds of individual Access Level assignments across multiple roles.

Benefits of Management Roles​

Management Roles address several common challenges in access governance. They reduce role bloat by enabling the creation of reusable, task-based roles that can be combined, helping organizations avoid the proliferation of hundreds of job-specific roles with overlapping permissions. When IT systems change, only the Management Roles that map to those systems need updating, leaving business processes and job-based roles unchanged. This dramatically simplifies system migrations and infrastructure changes.

The activity-based nature of Management Roles improves auditability by making it clear what specific tasks users can perform, which simplifies compliance audits and access reviews. Their flexibility supports dynamic organizational structures like project teams, temporary assignments, and cross-functional collaborations that don't fit traditional job-based roles. Finally, granular, task-specific roles make it easier to implement least-privilege access by default, granting only the permissions needed for specific responsibilities rather than broad access based on job title.

Next Steps​

Now that you understand Management Roles, explore how to work with them: