8 Organizational Hierarchies

The hierarchy management feature in Oracle Enterprise Communications Platform (Oracle ECP) provides you a way to organize and manage all devices (including MDM devices) across your organization.

Organizational hierarchies let you to model your business's real-world structure within Oracle ECP. You can create custom organizational structures—such as regions, buildings, departments, rooms, or any groupings that fit your business operations. The hierarchy is a tree structure, similar to a file system, constructed from "Organization" elements rather than folders. The structure can reflect physical, logical, or operational divisions—such as regions, towns, and stores.

You determine what each organizational element is named and what it represents. For example, an organization might model a hospital chain at the highest level, subdividing by state, town, hospital, and then down to units like cardiac, ICU, or NICU. Deeper levels might represent device states such as “staging,” “production,” or “storage.” Assigning devices to these structures ensures management reflects your actual business operations.

Devices can easily be located, tracked, and reassigned as the organizational structure changes.

Note:

Devices can belong to only one organization at a time.

Hardware Groups

Alongside organizations, Oracle ECP introduces the concept of “Hardware Groups.” Hardware Groups allow you to manage configurations, applications, and policies for specific sets of devices—regardless of where those devices are in the organizational hierarchy. Devices can be added to Hardware Groups either manually or through Criteria. For example, you can create a Criteria that automatically selects all devices in a particular organization, or multiple organizations, for a hardware group.

Every device in a hardware group receives the same configuration. Changes to a hardware group’s configuration are automatically deployed to all its devices.

Organizations have an indirect relationship to hardware groups. For instance, a hardware group’s Criteria can select all devices within a specific organizational unit (or units) to be included.

Users should consider the relationship between their Organizational Hierarchy and Hardware Groups to determine how best to segment and configure devices, as device configuration may drive how you build your organizational model.

Example: Using Hierarchies and Hardware Groups Together

Take a hospital system as an example. Their hierarchy might start with the hospital chain, then divide by state, town, hospital name, and then by hospital units such as cardiac or ICU. Further, they might segment by device status (for example, staging, production, storage). Devices in “staging” might have different configurations than those in “production”; as you move devices between these groups, their configurations (including policies or network access) automatically change based on their new assignment.