May
2
People Don’t Have Roles
May 2, 2008 |
There, I said it. Now let me explain it.
In individual-centric terms, a person has one or more roles. But in terms of how an organization views itself, roles contain people. When a person no longer has any role, they cease to exist as a member of the organization. Information systems model an organization-centric view and so in this context roles contain people. So what.
This all started in earnest as I’ve considered how to organize our directory structure. Since we’ve chosen Linux as the OS for our server environment, we have opted for some flavour of LDAP. In the case of Ubuntu this has resulted in openLDAP with a phpldapadmin front end. It hasn’t been a big technical journey - everybody and their dog has written some variant of the Howto that suits our purposes. The glitch is that information about setting up a schema is pretty thin on the ground. Perhaps it’s because it crosses the gap to the information management (IM) side of the house and is no longer purely technical - and that means that it’s big-buck consulting territory. Perhaps it’s because people assume that there’s too much variability in what to represent and how. Perhaps I’m just not looking in the right places.
In any case, it’s been a brain cramp to get a transition plan in place. Mostly it’s been about trying to take an existing mêlée of user-names/groups and rationalize them into something that will survive a change of roles (change of individuals? 
) with continuity while allowing people in the roles to feel like, well, people and not just roles, and that will scale well once we start enabling God’s people instead of just the congregation’s employees. How’s it working? Well at present there are less than a dozen users who map from their Windows desktops through Samba accounts to their Posix (Linux) accounts and groups. While users may have logins on their Desktops that look nice (in the form firstname.lastname) the rest of the system maps them by role (e.g. pastor.adults).
Next we need to make the transition with email so that when a staff member leaves their email doesn’t become defunct and generate business continuity issues. What? When someone is communicating with a staff member on church business they are interacting on a roll basis. If the email is name based, then the interaction breaks when the person leaves our organization because the interaction was person-based and not role-based. “But…”, you say? If we do this right (the “we” part including our users), then we’ll have email addresses for individuals and for roles as well. For example it@… is the email address for the IT Director and av@… for the AudioVisual Director. I hold one of these roles so I have the role-based mail ID, but I also hold Rick.Wightman@… so that if you want to ask me out for coffee (I will say yes - I like coffee) or see if I will drive for the Youth Group’s progressive supper then you should use this one. Hopefully our mail system will be able to differentiate which address mail was used and the reply-to address generated appropriately.
Yes there could be problems. Solutions bring these. I believe that, on top of the benefits I’ve hoped for above, it will prove useful in having individuals realize that they are not the position and this could be healthier for the church body. Continuity of communication can be ensured, and role-holders (from a person-perspective) realize that they are so much more than a role and that our Lord loves us for the role they play but he loves us because we are his even moreso.
Am I off my rocker? Tell me.