Capabilities and Privileges
Capabilities represent the skills that are available within an organization, for example language skills or possession of a professional qualification. Privileges represent the authority that an Organization Unit, Position or Group can have within an organization, such as the authority to approve expenditure up to a defined amount.
Once a Capability has been created it can be assigned to Groups and Positions. Capabilities assigned to a Group or Position represent "entry criteria" for that group or position: it is necessary to have that capability in order to be a valid member of the group or position.
You can assign Privileges to Groups, Positions and Organization Units. Privileges may be based on budgets and spending, work/product approval, resource allocation, or other factors. Specifying Privileges enables you to see the chains of authority throughout your organization.
You can also associate a system action with a privilege. System actions are tasks that might need to be authorized in some way. Like Privileges, they can be assigned to Organization Units, Positions or Groups. At run time, only users who hold the associated privilege are then allowed to execute that system action. See System Actions.
Whether positions inherit the privileges specified for an Organization Unit is determined by the run-time environment to which the organization model is exported. It is not defined in the Organization Modeler itself.
You can create categories for Capabilities and Privileges. Categories are a way of grouping your Capabilities and Privileges into meaningful units. You could create a Category for Language and then create Capabilities within that category for each language spoken in your organization; for example French, Polish, Chinese etc.
You can add extra information about a Capability or Privilege by assigning a Qualifier. For example, you may have created a Capability that represents an exam qualification but for a particular Position you may want to qualify that Capability by specifying a grade as well. To add qualifiers, check the Has qualifier box on the General tab in the Properties view. The Qualifier tab then becomes available. On that tab you can name and describe the qualifying information, and specify a data type that determines its allowable values, and if required specify a default value. For a description of the data types that qualifying information can have, see Data Types. Then, when you assign the Capability or Privilege to a Group or Position, you can specify the value of the Qualifier by typing it into the Value field on the Capabilities or Privileges tab.
You can assign other properties to Capabilities and Privileges. For example, you can specify a purpose and/or description for the Capability or Privilege.