When we originally designed and wrote Tessitura, there were some pieces of functionality that made their way into the system that I never really thought were fully formed or thought out. As a result these features tend to get very little use or confuse many users.
One such feature is constituency-based security. This feature allows you to define rights to one or more constituent functions (i.e. editing addresses) based on the highest ranking constituency of that constituent.
Development stories concerning constituencies are starting to come into view and we need to explore whether this security paradigm is worth continuing.
In my opinion, the whole idea of constituency-based security loses a bit of its shine as soon as you realize that it's all based on the highest ranking constituency only. In addition, the concept was put in place well before Control Groups was ever thought of and we might have thought twice about it if Control Groups were in the original plan. It's not that Control Group functionality replaces constituency-based security, but rather that sometimes you have to step back and wonder whether there aren't too many layers of complexity. Especially if one of those layers is not often used--a survey of Network implementation consultants seemed to show that very few sites ever implement this functionality, at least initially.
Another factor prompting this thread is that several times our internal discussion on on how we might better use constituencies going forward has been hampered when someone says "yeah, but don't forget about constituencies and security".
We've tried to model out what would happen if we changed the model so that security could be based on "any" constituency instead of "highest ranking" constituency. But that always creates problems. What if a constituent has both constituency 1 and constituency 2. Constituency 1 says they're allowed to edit addresses and constituency 2 says that they are not. What to do then?
So some help here, please. How many sites use this functionality now and how passionate about it are you?
As always, thanks in advance for the feedback!
We us this feature very little. It is only used regarding who has access to change high level donors in our patron services department.
--Tom
From: Tessitura Next Generation Forum [mailto:forums-nextgeneration@tessituranetwork.com] On Behalf Of Julie Carmody Sent: Thursday, February 18, 2010 8:42 PM To: Thomas Brown Subject: Re: [Tessitura Next Generation Forum] Constituency Based Security
At the Met, it is very important that a user group owns the ability to change Name/Address information. In death and divorce, renewing subscription ownership decisions are left up to a few staff members and this prevents an inbound rep from changing such without proper channels being notified. Also in the instance of high level donors, the address information is thoughtfully maintained using this feature. These constituents are maintained by our major gift/patron departments. This means though most met staff can view an address, they all cannot change them. But I will say that it has been a bit cumbersome to maintain and get a true picture of a user's rights. There is room for revision/improvement here as long as there is the ability for a select group of staff to control revisions on particular records.
From: Chuck Reif <bounce-chuckreif3941@tessituranetwork.com> Sent: 2/18/2010 1:37:18 PM
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