The purpose of the Role catalog is to provide a listing of all authorization levels or zones within an enterprise. Frequently, application security or behavior is defined against locally understood concepts of authorization that create complex and unexpected consequences when combined on the user desktop.

If roles are defined, understood, and aligned across organizations and applications, this allows for a more seamless user experience and generally more secure applications, as administrators do not need to resort to workarounds in order to enable users to carry out their jobs.

In addition to supporting security definition for the enterprise, the Role catalog also forms a key input to identifying organizational change management impacts, defining job functions, and executing end-user training.

As each role implies access to a number of business functions, if any of these business functions are impacted, then change management will be required, organizational responsibilities may need to be redefined, and retraining may be needed.

The Role catalog contains the following metamodel entities:

• Role