Business Roles
What Is a Business Role in ArchRepo?
A Business Role is a named job function or type of responsibility within the organisation. It represents a category of work — not a specific person. A person may hold multiple Business Roles; a Business Role may be held by multiple people.
Examples of Business Roles:
- Finance Manager
- Accounts Payable Clerk
- Customer Service Agent
- Field Engineer
- Procurement Approver
- System Administrator
Business Roles are used to capture who does what in the business: which processes they perform, which processes they are responsible for, and which applications they need access to.
Business Roles vs Application Roles
Business Roles and Application Roles are distinct concepts in ArchRepo and serve different purposes.
- A Business Role describes a job function or responsibility in the organisation — who people are and what work they do.
- An Application Role describes a set of permissions within an application — what people can do in a system (admin, write, or read access).
The mapping between them is documented using the Uses Application Role relationship and the Business Roles v Application Roles collection view. This mapping is rarely 1:1: a Finance Manager might need Application Roles across three different systems, and an Application Role might be shared by people in several different Business Roles.
Manages vs Performs
Business Roles have two distinct relationships to Business Processes:
| Relationship | What it means |
|---|---|
| Performs | This role actively carries out the activities in the process — they are the doer |
| Manages | This role is responsible for the process — they ensure it happens correctly, monitor quality, and escalate issues |
A single role can both manage and perform processes. For example, a Team Leader might perform the day-to-day customer onboarding process and manage the broader customer registration process that it is part of.
Documenting both relationships makes it clear not just who does the work, but who owns the outcome.
Transition States
Business Roles support Transition States, which track how roles change as the solution is delivered. This is useful for projects that involve organisational change alongside technical delivery:
- A new role may be created to operate the solution (e.g., a Data Quality Manager who did not exist before)
- An existing role’s responsibilities may change significantly (e.g., an Accounts Payable Clerk whose manual tasks are largely automated)
- A role may be retired as the solution takes over its function
Use Transition States to make this business change impact explicit in the architecture.
Collection Views
The Business Roles collection includes two cross-reference matrix views:
- Business Roles v Business Processes — maps every Business Role to the processes they perform or manage; a useful completeness check to ensure every process has at least one identified role
- Business Roles v Application Roles — the key access mapping view; shows which Application Roles each Business Role uses across all applications; useful for access design reviews and ensuring every Business Role has appropriate application access
Fields Reference
See Business Role Fields for a description of each field and guidance on what to record.