Representing roles in surface structures

The role as embedded concept in the Microsoft Personas entails that internal relationships between the roles are not explicitly defined or described either. However, as some Personas contain ‘persona variables’, describing the different configurations of the roles occupied by a particular Persona, depending on the organizational configuration in which the Persona is placed, some internal structure between the modeled roles is suggested. An example of this variation is the ‘CEO’ Persona, which comes in two versions; one for small enterprises and one for large enterprises. While this is not an explicit internal role structure, it indicates some degree of role specialization embedded in the Personas. Additionally, all the roles embedded in the Personas can be characterized as cross-industry roles in the sense that they are generalized to fit the roles of users across different industries.

However, while the literature on RBAC provides suggestions for bridging organizational roles and ESs, the technique is primarily concerned with authorization rights and less with user experience. RBAC roles are thus “binary” in nature in the sense that either the user has the required privileges to access functions or not. The RBAC role approach does not capture the frequency with which a role needs access to a given function or information nor how the role accesses functions and information.

Knowing that the accounts receivable role has read access rights to accounts in the general ledger does not provide much guidance on how the information should be accessed or displayed. The RBAC technique does thus only partially capture the design of role-oriented user interfaces in terms of displaying information to fit organizational roles at the user interaction level, and Zhu and Zhou (2008) argue that RBAC-roles are generally difficult to apply in human collaboration. This argument is in line with the findings in paper IV, where it is evident that application of RBAC roles does not capture the conceptual distinction between ‘positions’ and ‘roles’, and thus favors the hierarchical depiction of an organization, as opposed to the “actual” work carried out by individuals (cf. Suchman 1983).

3.2.2.2 Role-oriented user interfaces

A few attempts in existing IS literature have been made to explicitly suggest how to reflect roles in surface structures through user interfaces. Shneiderman and Plaisant (1994) propose a ‘role-centered’ design to user interfaces with the conceptual idea of a

‘Personal Role Manager’ (PRM) as a way of structuring and improving the user interface in ISs in order to “improve performance and reduce distraction while working in a role, and facilitate shifting of attention from one role to another” (p. 6). The idea of the PRM is thus that users with multiple roles can switch between user interfaces depending on the role they perform at a given point in time. The suggestion of a role manager is an interesting proposition from, at least, two perspectives. First, the role manager provides a perspective on how to reflect the organizational roles on the

presentational level of the ES. Second, the very notion of a role manger implicitly implies the occupation of multiple organizational roles (role aggregation) as something the user consciously switches between – as opposed to unconsciously and seamlessly transitioning from one role to another. Johansson (2009) thus points out, that if users need to consciously switch between the roles they occupy, the system at least needs to support a very easy switch between them.

The topic of representing roles in user interfaces for ESs has only been vaguely addressed, primarily through the application of Enterprise Portals (EP). Puschmann (2004) defines EPs as a single point access to inter- and intra-organizational ISs with the purpose of integrating information and present users with a role-oriented and personalized view of the information. In the context of portals, roles can be defined as:

“an activity set that a portal user, internal or external person or application, undertakes in order to achieve a desired business objective” (Carlsson and Hedman 2004, p. 271).

Carlsson and Hedman (2004) also provide some insight into how roles are represented in user interfaces of SAP’s EPs when stating that roles are:

“... a collection of activities that an employee carries out in one or more business scenarios of an organization. Users access the transactions, reports and Web-based applications in a role via a series of menus. Roles are specific to individual employees and match their specific tasks and service/information needs.”(p. 271)

While this statement provides some insight into how roles can be represented at the interaction level, no detailed account is provided of how roles are represented in the user interfaces or how the design accounts for role related structures, such as role aggregation. Additionally, Carlson and Hedman (ibid.) only address the representation of roles in EPs - not ESs in general. They thus explicitly call for additional research on

the application of the role concept in the context of ESs using organizational role theory to understand additional aspects roles in ESs.

A significant contribution of the two papers related to design and representation of organizational roles in role-oriented ESs (paper III and IV) is thus the investigation of how organizational roles can be reflected in user interfaces. The direct representation of roles in the user interfaces of ESs is a key finding in relation to answering how roles can be represented at the interaction level of ESs. The reflection of Personas in the 21

“role-centers” of NAV 2009 RTC and the representation of roles through “Work Centers” in All-in-One 8.81 w/ NWBC thus offer concrete suggestions for how to reflect organizational roles in the user interfaces of role-oriented ESs. Screenshots of the role-oriented user interfaces in the two systems can be found in the appendix of paper IV.

The unified approach to representing roles in the role-centers of Microsoft’s NAV 2009 RTC is directly traceable to the embedded approach to modeling roles in the Microsoft Customer Model (see section 3.2.1.2). However, the fixed level of role aggregation entailed by this approach combined with the need for associating a user login with a different user interface, if users want to switch to another role or role set, entails a high dependence of fit of the predefined user interfaces, unless the interfaces are adapted to the users in individual client organizations. Likewise, the representation of roles through ‘Work Centers’ in SAP’s All-in-one 8.81 w/ NWBC and delivery of role content through ‘WorkSets’ in packages is traceable to the approach of modeling roles as independent concept in the SAP enterprise model. This componentized approach to representing roles in user interfaces of ESs entails a more flexible degree of role aggregation, as content from other roles can be included in a user interface without much effort.

The design of multiple user interfaces in role-oriented ESs to accommodate different organizational roles is a significant departure from the single user interfaces in

conventional ESs. The findings thus provide a link between Shneiderman and Plaisant’s (1994) theoretical proposition of a Personal Role Manager and a practical application of this concept. Furthermore, the direct link between the enterprise models and the user interfaces in the vendors’ ESs provides insight into which roles that are supported by the systems, although the embedded approach to modeling and representing roles in the Microsoft case only makes establishment of this link possible from a theoretical perspective.