The Workbench Lenses

How the product is organized — a pinned My work block plus three intent groups: Lenses, Operations, and Settings.

One coherent shape

A governance platform has a lot of surfaces — identities, accounts, entitlements, reviews, provisioning, reconciliation, policies, connections, and more. The risk is that they feel like a pile of unrelated screens. RapidValue's information architecture (IA — the way the surfaces are organized and named) gives the product one coherent shape, so a user always knows where they are, where to go next, and how the pieces relate.

The organizing idea is intent. One block is pinned because it answers "what is mine to do?"; everything else is grouped by why you would open it — to observe, to do governance work, or to configure. A buyer orienting themselves can read the four groups top to bottom and understand the whole product from them.

My work — pinned, the persona home

My work is pinned at the top of the navigation and is never collapsed. It is the personal block: your home, your inbox of tasks to decide, your requests, the access shop where you request access, your team, your delegations, your profile. An end-user who only ever needs to request access and act on their own tasks sees essentially this block and nothing else — they never encounter governance or administration surfaces they cannot use.

What lands you here depends on your role: an end-user lands on their My work home; an admin or auditor lands on a posture overview. The navigation reveals only what your role and enabled features permit — it never grants access, it only shows what your permissions already allow.

Lenses — observe the estate

Lenses are the read-first surfaces. You open a lens to see the current state of the estate without necessarily changing anything. This is where auditors live, and where anyone goes to answer "what does access look like right now?" The lenses include:

• Directory — identities, accounts, entitlements, applications, systems, and the assignments (the identity-to-entitlement edges) between them.
• Posture — the access-compliance and executive views, reconciliation, classification, non-human-identity (NHI — a service account, token, or other non-person identity) ownership.
• Trail — the audit record and compliance evidence.

Throughout the product, the comparison between what access should exist and what actually exists is labelled Expected and Actual — the lenses are where you read that comparison.

Operations — do the governance work

Operations is where governance actually happens — the surfaces where you do something, not just look. Grouped here:

• Reviews & approvals — access reviews and the separation-of-duties (SoD — separation of duties, preventing one person from holding a toxic combination of access) workbench.
• Reconcile & lifecycle — the reconciliation engine and the joiner/mover/leaver (JML) lifecycle.
• Provisioning — provisioning operations and the tracked write jobs behind them.
• Discover & onboard — role mining, application and connector onboarding, deprecation plans.
• Compliance — the advisor's recommendations, break-glass access, policy building, and reporting.

If My work is your personal queue and Lenses is the read view, Operations is where an administrator, reviewer, or security team member turns findings into governed action.

Settings — configure and connect

Settings is where the platform is set up. To keep configuration from sprawling into loose admin pages, every tenant setting lives in one of three config homes, split by who sets it:

Knowing which of the three homes a setting belongs to is itself part of the IA: a new configuration surface does not become a fourth home — it becomes a tab under the right one.

💡 Tip

The three-home split answers a recurring question — "where do I change X?" — by persona. If it is tool access control, it is Platform access; if it is business policy, Governance settings; if it is technical plumbing or a connection, Environment & connections.

The rule that keeps it coherent

The architecture stays clean because of one discipline: every surface claims exactly one home. A new page hangs as an item under one of the four groups and one of its sections — never as a new top-level group, and never "loose". Some surfaces are consolidated as tabs of a parent rather than standalone pages, and a few are reachable only by deep link, but each still belongs to exactly one place.

Underneath, the surfaces share a common shell — the same page header, the same object workbench layout for any object, the same conventions for loading, empty, error, and permission-denied states, all translated into the supported locales. That shared shell is why moving between a lens and an operation feels like the same product, not a new one.

💡 Tip

For a buyer, the four groups double as a capability map: My work shows self-service maturity, Lenses shows what you can observe, Operations shows what governance you can run, and Settings shows how deeply you can configure and integrate.

Further reading

• Governing API Access
• Webhooks & Notifications
• Reconciliation Engine