Models for Understanding Responsibilities

Abstract

In everyday life, we observe that system failures and system inefficiencies regularly arise because of misunderstandings about responsibility (‘I thought that you were supposed to be doing that’). Modelling the assignment of responsibilities helps make clear to the actors in a process what their responsibilities actually are. Other classes of system failure arise when the nature of an assigned responsibility is misunderstood (particularly common when discussing responsibilities across organisations). Because Alice has been assigned some responsibility in organisation X, Bob in organisationYinterprets this responsibility in the context of organisation Y, not X. Modelling the nature of responsibilities helps to reduce misunderstandings amongst actors in a process about the scope of the responsibility and the context in which it was given or assumed. Another class of failure arises when an assigned responsibility is improperly discharged (or, perhaps, not discharged in a timely way) because the agent holding the responsibility has insufficient resources to discharge the responsibility. This is particularly likely where an agent has multiple responsibilities that are competing for resources. It is particularly problematic in situations where the agent has to interact with multiple authorities (who may have different goals and who need not necessarily be in a position to negotiate). To understand this class of failure, we need to be able to model both the assignment of responsibilities and the responsibilities themselves. Finally, failures (or more commonly inefficiencies) arise when a responsibility is assigned to a responsible who has no previous experience of that responsibility and/or who has to acquire some information/knowledge in order to discharge the responsibility. The may use models of both the nature of a responsibility and the assignment of a responsibility to discover what to do and who to appeal to for information.