Glossary

The words, defined.

This product uses a handful of terms precisely, and the precision is the point — a responsibility is not a task, a backup is not a team, and a workload reading is not a measurement. Here is what each one means here.

People Graph: The connected model of an organization: people, the roles they hold, the responsibilities those roles carry, the authority attached to them, the skills people have, what they can access and who covers whom. It is called a graph because the relationships carry the meaning — a list of employees with job titles is not one.
Responsibility: Something that must happen regardless of who currently performs it. It has exactly one owner, a backup, a rhythm, an escalation route and a way of evidencing that it was done. The distinction from a task is that a task finishes and a responsibility continues.
Role: A position, defined independently of whoever holds it: a purpose in one sentence, the responsibilities it carries, the authority it has, who it reports to and who covers it. A role outlives the person in it, which is why the next holder inherits rather than improvises.
Authority: What a role may decide without asking — a spend limit, a signature right, a refund threshold. Recorded in bands with an escalation above each one, so the question of whose decision something is stops being asked.
Backup: The named second person for a responsibility. Naming a team is not a backup; naming somebody who lacks the access, the authority or the knowledge is a paper exercise. Orglume checks all three.
Key-person risk: The concentration of responsibilities, knowledge, access and relationships on one individual. It is a structural observation about the business rather than an assessment of the person, and the wording matters.
Knowledge area: A specific body of understanding — a customer, a supplier, a system, a process — with a primary expert, a secondary expert where one exists, and a documentation link. The part of a departure that is hardest to replace.
Knowledge concentration: A knowledge area with one expert and no documentation. Flagged as a business risk, because this is the thing that genuinely walks out of the door when somebody resigns.
Responsibility map: The whole company arranged by function, with the responsibilities beneath each one and a name against each. The empty slots are the point: unowned work is invisible precisely because it is absent from everything else.
Ownership structure: The organization arranged by what people are accountable for rather than who they report to. It usually looks quite different from the reporting chart, and that difference is where the surprises live.
Active person: Someone with a current employment or engagement record. The billing unit. Archived leavers and candidates who have not started are not active and are not billed — worth checking against any product in this category.
Role template: What a role comes with before anybody holds it: default access, explicitly denied access, required policies and training, introductions, and first objectives. The single largest reduction in administration in the product.
Access record: An authoritative list of who can reach which systems and at what level, including the reason and the date. Maintaining the record is valuable even where Orglume cannot technically provision the system in question.
Denied access: Systems a role explicitly must not reach, recorded as such. A denial is a control you can check against reality; an omission is merely an oversight waiting to be discovered.
Access exception: Somebody holding access their role does not include, listed with the reason and the approver. Usually a short list, and usually the most interesting page in a security review.
Access review: A periodic confirmation by each system's owner that the people who can reach it should still be able to. After the first one it leads with what has changed, so the work scales with change rather than headcount.
Onboarding workspace: The shared plan for one person's start: tasks with owners and dates, documents to sign, policies to acknowledge, access to grant and objectives for the first month. Visible to the joiner, not only to the manager.
Offboarding plan: The generated list of everything that has to move when somebody leaves: responsibilities, access, objectives, customer relationships, knowledge areas and equipment. Generated rather than remembered is the entire point.
Joiner, mover, leaver: The three moments that cause the most damage in a growing company, usually because software treats them as unrelated screens. Here they are stages of one record, which is why a role change can adjust access rather than just a title.
Provenance: The records an AI answer came from, named and openable, with the date each was last updated. When the subject is a colleague, an unsourced answer is worse than no answer.
Daily briefing: A short morning summary across five areas — availability, onboarding, responsibilities, access and objectives — scoped to what the reader may see. A quiet day produces a short briefing rather than a padded one.
Workload reading: An estimate of pressure built from owned responsibilities, items falling due, objectives and availability, always shown with its evidence. Called a reading rather than a measurement because no software can know how hard somebody's week really is.
Controller and processor: For your employees' data you are the controller and we process it on your instructions; for your administrators' accounts we are the controller. Confusing the two changes who has to answer a data subject request, and it is the commonest mistake in this category.
Sensitive category: Compensation, health-related absence and private manager notes. Each sits behind its own permission, is excluded from assistant answers by default, and is never interpreted or scored by the product.
Evidence: The artefact showing a responsibility was discharged — the report, the filing, the signed document. A status somebody set by hand records what they believed; the attachment records what happened.
Retention period: How long a category of record is kept before it is presented for deletion or extension by a named person. A retention policy nobody executes is a document rather than a control.

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