Roles

Roles describe how people fit into the workflow. A role is a class of users who perform the same type of work, such as clerks or managers. Your business rules typically specify which roles do which activities. For example, a rule can say that department managers (a role) must approve external course requests.

Roles direct the work to types of people rather than to individuals. Identifying roles instead of individual users makes a workflow more flexible and easier to maintain. Associating roles with users makes it easy to ensure workflow users the security access that they need to access the pages where they complete their work.

Roles remain stable, even as people change jobs. For example, if an employee in the Research and Development (R&D) department requests an external class, the system forwards the request to R&D Manager, not to Vic Rumpel, who is the current R&D manager. PeopleSoft application data serves as the basis for defining roles throughout your organization.