The role management software vendor community is relatively young, and as such, Burton Group says there is no clear market leader. Vendors can be categorized into two segments: general purpose solutions and embedded solutions.

Role mining and discovery: The ability to collect user access and authorization information from a variety of resources, associate this data with candidate roles and responsibilities, propose alternative roles and leverage decisions made about the data on an ongoing basis.

Role management software enables the creation and lifecycle management of enterprise job roles, according to Forrester Research. It does this by discovering and logically grouping application-level, fine-grained authorizations and entitlements into enterprise job roles, which can then be assigned to people by rule-based provisioning or request-approval workflows.

High-tech consumer products and services of all kinds are making their way into the workplace. They include everything from smart phones, voice-over-IP systems and flash memory sticks to virtual online worlds. And as people grow more accustomed to having their own personal technology at their beck and call -- and in fact can't imagine functioning without it -- the line between what they use for work and what they use for recreation is blurring.