Delegated administration involves allowing non-core IT personnel, be it business managers, employees, or external users such as partners or customers, to independently administer a predefined set of functions, users, or data.

Here are a few examples:

Example 1 – Managing access permissions of external users

A Supplier wants to streamline its purchasing process by allowing its customers to enter purchase orders directly to its purchasing system via the Web. However, Customer A has 10 different purchasing agents and they all need different access permissions to the Supplier’s purchasing system, since each one of them should only access specific parts of the Supplier's online catalog. Using delegated administration, the Supplier can create a single Super user for Customer A and define that this Super user can manage up to 10 different users in the system, but ONLY for certain roles. In this way, the Customer A can carry the burden of managing these users.

Example 2 – Managing a mobile population of external users

This is a same situation as above, except that these users from Customer A are temporary or are being frequently replaced. By using the delegated administration rights provided to Customer A Super, the Same Super user can terminate the old users and create new users without additional costs to the Supplier.

Problem – Delegating IT administrative rights to non-IT people

In order to reduce IT administration cost and shorten response time, upper management decided that it would be best if certain activities such as opening a new Network account or requesting a new Remote Access token will be delegated to the business managers themselves. However, business managers are not familiar with the tools used by the IT system administrator to create an account, nor are they familiar with what is required in order to make this account viable. Delegated administration solutions will provide the businesses managers with a graphical user interface allowing them to interact with the systems they need to request access for or perform the activity on.

Delegated administration solutions today are sometimes independent applications but, are more often integrated or bundled with other Web access control solutions or user provisioning solutions - the barriers between the two is blurring.

When a simple delegated administration model is required, it might make sense to build such a solution rather than buy one. Evaluating the "Build vs. Buy" makes sense for these types of solutions especially for smaller organization or very specific needs.