People and policies: transforming the human-computer partnership

Policy-driven systems represent a significant change in the human-computer partnership as substantial responsibility is shifted from people to systems. In fact, the shift to policy-driven systems may be understood as a set of specific, distinctive changes in this partnership. This paper describes six such distinctive features of mature policy-driven systems from the human viewpoint and discusses the implications of these for the development of policies and the operation of policy-driven systems.