Kevin Kampman has added his opinion to latest RBAC thread. Kevin makes an interesting point:
Another challenge is to clarify what a role represents. A business role is an articulation of a business relationship or responsibility. A technical or IT role is a set of privileges or tools that are used to accomplish the business role. Business roles map to IT roles. If you try and merge the two into one, you come up with an IT role. It becomes difficult to ascertain what it was or is intended to accomplish, and it becomes inflexible, bound to an application.
This reminds me of Alan Cooper’s The Inmates are running the Asylum. Cooper makes the point that anything coupled with a computer becomes a computer. This includes but is not limited to: alarm clocks, cars, ATMs, and naval warships. (Come on admit it, you too have ripped a hotel alarm clock out of the wall because you couldn’t figure out how to shut it off; we’ve all done it.) Cooper’s overall point is that the Designer must be extremely careful in her design choices so as to not lose the intent and spirit of the original object before it got coupled with a computer.
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