Top rules for a successful Certificate Management

In the next months I am working on the rules for a successful certificate management system. The idea behind that is not to much to see what we do with certificates, it is more about what is the foundation of a certificate in these days: Who has requested a certificate, who decided what is the content of a certificate, who has approved processing a certificate, how has the certificate traveled to a user or machine. So starting from the identitiy management view of users to the tracking process of a certificate over all phases in the lifecycle of a certificate. So I will start with that next.