Excerpt from Enterprise Architecture Fundamentals:
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Roles are set at the boundaries between enterprises and systems, and their significance for EA is reinforced by the immersion of enterprises in digital environments; for example:
- Compliance with privacy regulations cannot be achieved without a built-in distinction between managed (e.g., customers) and unmanaged (e.g., mined identities) roles.
- The dismantling of physical boundaries, the generalization of digital identities, and the spreading of smart software agents put roles front and center for issues of confidentiality.
From the perspective of enterprise architecture, requirements should therefore be explicit with regard to:
- Roles defined at the business level should be fulfilled by people whose identity is defined by external organizations, people acting as individuals (e.g., chef ) or as representatives of collective entities (e.g., food safety regulator).
- Roles defined at the systems level (actors in UML parlance) should be fulfilled by actual (e.g., user) or symbolic (e.g., banking service) agents.
- Roles defined at the physical level are typically fulfilled through the Internet of things (IoT); e.g., rice cooker. That distinction is necessary if organizational aspects (or roles) are to be defined and managed at the enterprise level independently of functional (systems) and technical (applications) ones.
That distinction is necessary if organizational aspects (or roles) are to be defined and managed at the enterprise level independently of functional (systems) and technical (applications) ones.
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