4.4 Summary and Conclusion

The literature has paid little attention to the intensive investigation of a policy life cycle and the processes involved.

This chapter presents an overview of the functional areas required by the application of policies. In contrast to existing publications, organisational aspects such as responsibilities, transfer of work and testing of policies are considered. This is necessary, because policies are not used in an encapsulated environment. Despite of this fact, the presentation always focuses on the policies themselves.

The functional areas are named and described, not exhaustively, but detailed enough to get an idea of their complexity. Each functional area is represented by a policy supporting process, which encapuslates the implementation of one functional area. Characteristics common to almost all processes are described by comparison with active policies. A policy centric functional model of the processes is presented and after that each of the processes were described.

An enhanced policy life cycle is introduced and it is showed that a policy passes certain distinctive states, and one or more processes or actions are related to each state.

In chapter , it is concluded that the application of policies in various scenarios needs additional information and control. This enhanced policy life cycle and the functional model show that the flexibility of policies potentially involve complex processes for policy-based management. This enlarges the requirements for additional information and control to the policy-based management itself. With the description of the supporting processes, it is concluded that policies and the functional units need control, information, and configuration. Understanding the processes as flexible functional units, like tasks in a workflow management system, entails constraints on these tasks and roles affiliated with them [BFA 97]. Therefore, management for the processes in the application of policies is necessary. This is seen as policy management.

In the next chapter, the concept of metapolicies is reconsidered. It will be shown that the the concept of metapolicies fulfils the requirements of providing information and control of the policy life cycle to support the processes of the life cycle.