Responsibility Modelling - Related Papers
To get started in this area, we recommend looking at the first Powerpoint presentation that introduces responsibility modelling. The paper on responsibility assignment presents a justification for using responsibilities and Responsibility Modelling for Civil Emergency Planning expands on the material in the chapter, discussing how responsibility modelling can be used to model responsibilities across multi-agency systems.
Responsibility Modelling in Socio-technical Systems - Ian Sommerville
Powerpoint Presentation that introduces the notion of responsibility modelling.
Deriving Information Requirements from Responsibility Models - Ian Sommerville, Russell Lock, Tim Storer and John E. Dobson
Powerpoint Presentation that discusses how responsibility models can be used as a basis for deriving system requirements.
Models for Responsibility Assignment - Ian Sommerville
Responsibility assignment modelling is concerned with developing a picture of how the responsibilities in a socio-technical system are distributed across the different automated elements and actors in that system. At this stage, we are not concerned with the details of the responsibilities themselves, nor with what the actors in the system have to do to discharge these responsibilities. Rather, a responsibility model presents a succinct picture of ‘who is responsible for what’ that can be used to identify responsibilities that have not been assigned, responsibilities that have been misassigned and actors in the system who may be overloaded with responsibilities. We argue that these models have a role to play in identifying sources of undependability in a system. They can be used to help identify requirements that are inconsistent with the responsibility structures and to design robust and reliable operational processes.
Causal Responsibility Models - Ian Sommerville
This paper discusses the ways in which we can model how responsibility can be assigned to agents and how responsibility models can facilitate discussions about the nature of responsibilities in organisations. These models document responsibilities in an organisation, provide insights into possible vulnerabilities due to responsibility misassignment and facilitate discussion about the nature of specific responsibilities. However, we have not, so far, tried to model the responsibilities themselves. Such a model might include information about the attributes of the responsibility, the relationships between these attributes and how one responsibility is dependent on other responsibilities.
The difficulties of developing such a model of responsibilities as abstractions in their own right should not be under-estimated. We have already discussed how the word ‘responsibility’ is used in a very broad way and it is not possible, in our view, to have a single model that encompasses all different types of responsibility. A further difficulty arises because responsibilities are always interpreted by the holder of the responsibility and their culture, education, competence and experience influences that interpretation. This is one reason why it is often difficult to decide who should be blamed when some accident or incident occurs and a tribunal of some kind examines the ways in which individuals have discharged their assigned responsibilities. Because of these difficulties, I focus here on the more limited, but still challenging, problem of modelling causal responsibilities.
Sommerville, I. (2007). Causal Responsibility Models. In Responsibility and Dependable Systems. Dewsbury, G. and Dobson, J. (eds)., London: Springer. 187-207.
Responsibility Modelling for Civil Emergency Planning - Ian Sommerville, Tim Storer and Russell Lock
This paper presents a new approach to analysing and understanding civil emer- gency planning based on the notion of responsibility modelling combined with HAZOPS-style analysis of information requirements. Our goal is to represent com- plex contingency plans so that they can be more readily understood, so that in- consistencies can be highlighted and vulnerabilities discovered. In this paper, we outline the framework for contingency planning in the UK and introduce the notion of responsibility models as a means of representing the key features of contingency plans. Using a case study of a flooding emergency, we illustrate our approach to re- sponsibility modelling and suggest how it adds value to current textual contingency plans.
Sommerville, I., Storer, T., Lock, R. (2009). Responsibility Modelling for Civil Emergency Planning. Risk Management 11, 179–207.
Responsibility Modelling for Risk Analysis - Russell Lock, Tim Storer & Ian Sommerville
This paper proposes a novel approach to systems modelling based on responsibilities. The approach is designed to help users identify and analyse the hazards and associated risks that can arise in complex socio-technical systems that span organisational boundaries. Through a case study this paper shows how the technique can identify the vulnerabilities that may arise because human, organisational or system agents fail to discharge the responsibilities assigned to them.
Lock, R., Storer, T., Sommerville, I. and Baxter, G. (2009). Responsibility Modelling for Risk Analysis. Proc. ESREL 2009. Prague, September, 2009. pp 1103-1109.
‘That’s How The Bastille Got Stormed’: Issues of Responsibility in User-Designer Relations - Dave Martin, Mark Rouncefield
This paper presents data and analyses from a long term ethnographic study of the development of an electronic patient records system in a UK hospital Trust – TA ‘Dependable Deployment’. The project is a public private partnership (PPP) between the Trust and a US based software house (USCo) contracted to supply, configure and support their customizable-off-the-shelf (COTS) healthcare information system in cooperation with an in-hospital project team. We use data drawn from our observational studies to highlight a range of responsibility issues in designer-user relationships.
Martin, D. & Rouncefield, M. 'That's How The Bastille Got Stormed': Issues of Responsibility in User-Designer Relations. In Mackie, J. and Rouncefield. M. (2005) (eds) Proceedings of the 5th Annual DIRC Research Conference. pp82-91.
Complexities of Multi-organisational Error Management - John Dobson, Simon Lock, David Martin
In this paper we shall look at some of the problems in designing an information and communication (ICT) system for an organisation located in a complex multi-organisational setting. We shall look in particular at the handling of errors both within the ICT itself and in the complex multi- organisational activities which the ICT is designed to support. We shall discuss the role of ethnography in uncovering some of the complexities and possible sources of error. We shall conclude by offering some advice to system designers which should prevent them from repeating mistakes which have been made all too often before.
Lock, S., Martin, D. & Dobson, J. (2005). Complexities of Multi-Organisation Error Management. In: Complexity in Design and Engineering (CID) Workshop.
Deriving Information Requirements from Responsibility Models - I Sommerville, R Lock, T Storer, J Dobson
This paper describes research in understanding the require- ments for complex information systems that are constructed from one or more generic COTS systems. We argue that, in these cases, behavioural requirements are largely defined by the underlying system and that the goal of the requirements engineering process is to understand the in- formation requirements of system stakeholders. We discuss this notion of information requirements and propose that an understanding of how a socio-technical system is structured in terms of responsibilities is an effective way of discovering this type of requirement. We introduce the idea of responsibility modelling and show, using an example drawn from the domain of emergency planning, how a responsibility model can be used to derive information requirements for a system that coordinates the multiple agencies dealing with an emergency.
Patterns of Responsibility - Marian Iszatt-White, Simon Kelly, Dave Martin, Mark Rouncefield
This paper considers issues of responsibility, leadership and leadership development through drawing on prolonged periods of observational, ethnographic research of educational leaders 'at work'. In an era of a supposed crisis in leadership, we use our rich data and interdisciplinary backgrounds to consider leadership development as essentially a design problem, adapting the notion of patterns that emerges in the architectural work of Christopher Alexander and the organisational studies of Tom Erickson.
Iszatt-White, M., Kelly, S., Martin, D & Rouncefield, M. (2005). Patterns of Responsibility. In Proceedings of the 5th Annual DIRC Research Conference, Edinburgh 2005., Mackie, J and Rouncefield, M., pp. 92-99
David Greenwood, Ian Sommerville, "Responsibility Modelling for the Sociotechnical Risk Analysis of Coalitions of Systems", 2011 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics