The Role Mining Process Model - Underlining the Need for a Comprehensive Research Perspective

Organizations that migrate from identity-centric to role-based Identity Management face the initial task of defining a valid set of roles for their employees. Due to its capabilities of automated and fast role detection, role mining as a solution for dealing with this challenge has gathered a rapid increase of interest in the academic community. Research activities throughout the last years resulted in a large number of different approaches, each covering specific aspects of the challenge. In this paper, firstly, a survey of the research area provides insight into the development of the field, underlining the need for a comprehensive perspective on role mining. Consecutively, a generic process model for role mining including pre- and post-processing activities is introduced and existing research activities are classified according to this model. The goal is to provide a basis for evaluating potentially valuable combinations of those approaches in the future.