Understanding Super Agencies and Agencies

A single deployment of Civic Platform supports one super agency and multiple agencies. The Civic Platform installation creates the super agency and creates the user account with super agency privileges. The super agency user creates additional agencies as required to satisfy business requirements.

Each agency can be setup to be completely independent or share information with other agencies. All agencies and the super agency share a common database provided through the Civic Platform deployment.

At the super agency level, you create and setup agencies with agency level functionality, which includes:

• Agency metadata (name, jurisdiction, address, and so forth)

• Enabling audit logs

• Enabling solution modules

• Other miscellaneous setup information

See Civic Platform On-Premise Supplement for detailed information that applies at the agency level.

Accela licenses one solution module at the super agency level (agency name = SuperAgency, module name = SuperAgency) and licenses several solution modules (Solutions) at the agency level.

At the super agency level, you define super agency-specific user groups and specify user group capability according to 34 function IDs (FIDs). You also specify the solution modules to which each agency has access. At the agency level, you define module-specific user groups, for each module to which the agency has access, and specify user group capability according to 590 FIDs.

For both the super agency and agency levels, individual users can belong to only one group per module. At the agency level, an individual user can belong to multiple groups across different modules.

In general, you setup agencies to define and isolate organizational entities that follow a specific set of processes on specific object types (processing building permits, for example).