The use of roles in Identity Management Infrastructures (IdMI) has proven to be a solution for reorganising and securing access structures of employees. The definition of enterprise-wide roles is one of the most challenging and costly tasks during role development projects. It needs to be carried out on the basis of a predefined Role Development Methodology (RDM). In this paper we present existing methodologies and show their respective pros and cons. Lately some researchers have informally stated that hybrid role development is the most promising way to define roles, however, there hasn't been given a well-defined justification for this decision. The main contribution of this paper is hence the deduction of evaluation criteria based on information gathered from literature, practical experiences, and shortcomings of existing role development approaches. The evaluation criteria form the basis for a comparison framework verifying the assumption that hybrid RDMs are superior to Role Engineering and Role Mining methodologies.

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Today's companies are under considerable strain. Several events or developments such as the global economic crises or the ongoing globalization process contribute to this situation. Meanwhile, however, companies have realized that the concept of virtual organizations represents an efficient measure to counter the current challenges. More and more companies make use of this concept supported by technologies like collaboration platforms. However, the application of such collaboration platforms brings along some changes for organizations in doing their business. For instance, interaction between people, who could not get in touch before, is thereby fostered in particular. Employees of different organizations, even across countries' boundaries, can set up new relationships due to the deployment of collaboration platforms. This paper analyses the impact of collaboration platforms and their effects on the daily business of organizations.

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