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What Is Authority Manager?

Authority Manager is a Stanford-developed web application that allows you to view and grant authority across the many administrative applications on campus. It is designed to allow the right person to grant authority to others in a distributed environment. For each administrative system, an individual may have access to view, enter, or approve privileged information. This access is determined by their authority. Authority Manager is the place to see what authority any person has, or to grant them additional authority.

Authority is granted based on three main criteria: business function, organization, and a specific privilege.

business function A set of privileges that represent a defined University business activity.
Examples: Admissions, Financial Aid, Payroll, Time/Leave.
organization Any department or group in the Official University Org Hierarchy. All privileges are granted in the context of an organization.
privilege A specific task or set of tasks that can be granted to an individual. Privileges are self-contained — for example, the "administer leave" privilege covers all the data and tasks required to do that job, in all affected business systems.
limit Privileges of different types can be limited by projects, awards, dollar amounts, populations, careers, and so on, to tailor the authority to the specific individual.

Some important points to remember are:

  • You can grant only the authority you've been given as grantable, up to the limits and conditions set for you.
  • Having authority doesn't necessarily mean you can access the related administrative systems — your authority must be active. Inactive authority may be:
    • pending prerequisites (such as training you must complete), or
    • grant-only (such as a task you manage but don't do yourself).
  • Your pre-selected views show you your authority, your authority-granting proxies, and org views for the top-level organization(s) where you hold grantable authority.
  • You can look at a view for any person or organization in the university using the tools on the Authority Manager home page.

Oracle Financials users

Oracle Financials allows both vacation delegation (selecting someone to act on your behalf for a specified period of time) and the ability to give someone access to your Worklist (typically, to allow colleagues with similar authority to act for each other at any time, or for emergency backup) as explained on the FinGate website

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