507: Delegation of Authority for Systems Business Processes
Revised: August 2018
Delegation reassigns approvals and tasks in systems from one user (delegator) to a designee, enabling the designee to perform individual actions on the delegator's behalf for a specified period of time. Delegation should be used when an employee will be out of the office or unable to access the system long enough that business processes will be unduly delayed.
Delegation does not remove overall responsibility for supervision or decision-making from the delegator nor does it transfer responsibility and ownership for the tasks/approvals being delegated. Delegation may not be to a position that does not have that level of responsibility in the formal job description. For example, deans may delegate approvals that are their responsibility to an associate dean or fiscal officer, but not to an administrative assistant or a department chair.
Delegation should not be used to assign initiation tasks when a system role exists for that purpose and should not be used to enhance or override assigned security. For example, Workday is configured to allow both managers and the departmental support staff to initiate human resources transactions. This eliminates the need for managers to delegate the initiation of transactions.
Delegations should be temporary and last no longer than 12 weeks. Generally, tasks and approvals should be reassigned through the appropriate system security role if reassignment is required for more than 12 weeks. Any delegations to exceed 12 weeks must be approved by the Executive Vice President & Provost, Vice President, Dean, Associate Vice President of Business and Finance, or Associate Vice President of Human Resources.
It is the responsibility of the delegator or manager to ensure that an employee to whom tasks are delegated is notified of the delegation and trained in that business process.
Definitions
System Security Role - Security defines what information a viewer can see, the transactions they can perform, and their role in business process workflows.
Appropriate Level of Delegation - Appropriate delegation is defined as one supervisory level up or down.