authorityfor

Authorityfor is a term used in discussions of organizational governance and access control to denote the formal grant of authority to perform a specific action or decision. The concept is often described in policy or workflow documents and may appear as authorityfor or as authority-for in natural language.

Origin and meaning: The word combines authority with for, signaling the scope or purpose of the grant. In practice, authorityfor is implemented as an entitlement assigned to a subject—such as a person, role, or system—that authorizes particular actions on designated resources. It functions as a concrete predicate in policy statements or access-control rules.

Applications: It is used to specify who may approve actions, what actions are allowed, and under what constraints. In approval workflows, authorityfor identifies the approver and any limits, such as maximum monetary amounts or time windows. In IT and data governance, it can be encoded in role-based or policy-based access control systems to automate enforcement and auditing and to support segregation of duties.

Implementation details: Authorityfor is typically expressed as a rule or tuple: (Subject, Action, Resource, Constraints, Duration). Systems store such entitlements in entitlement catalogs, access-control lists, or policy engines and enforce them at decision time. Revocation, renewal, and provenance are important for maintaining accurate authority over time.

Examples: A finance manager may have authorityfor: ApproveExpense up to $10,000; a systems engineer may have authorityfor: DeployProductionChanges during maintenance windows; an HR administrator may have authorityfor: UpdateEmployeeRecords during onboarding.