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Accountable TrustwortHy Organizations and Systems

AThOS is a two-year project started on July 2015, and funded by Compagnia di Sanpaolo. It tackles the problem of realizing trustworthy enterprises - private as well as public - by making accountable their internal business processes. The long-term goal of the project is therefore to enrich the business process management philosophy with concepts and techniques conceived for enabling accountable processes, and also for identifying decisional and objective responsibilities when unexpected deviations, undermining the trust among a number of partner enterprises, occur.

The Problem

Competitive enterprises ground their behaviour on two fundamental features: efficiency and accountability.
Efficiency is mainly concerned about the definition of productive processes, or documental flows, and tries to optimize the usage of the available resources reducing, for instance, the time between the issue of a new request and its satisfaction.
Accountability, on the other hand, refers to the capability of an enterprise to be reliable towards its stakeholders (i.e., any subject that interacts with the enterprise independently of her role, as for instance, customers, employees, suppliers, etc.). In other words, an accountable enterprise commits to understand and respect the expectations of its stakeholders, and to be liable for actions and decisions that are taken during its operative processes. Accountability therefore lies at the level of the interactions among the actors involved within the enterprise.
While the efficiency problem has been widely investigated, and has stimulated the definition of the Business Process Management concepts, the accountability problem has not yet received the attention it deserves. AThOS aims at filling this gap by formalizing and developing a completely novel methodology for enforcing accountability in enterprises.

Main Objectives:

  1. Development of a novel standard for the representation of Sociotechnical Systems (STS), including a declarative methodology for modeling interactions among stakeholders
  2. Study of accountability as a property for stakeholders and organizations based on model-based diagnostic methods for tracking down objective and decisional responsibilities
  3. Implementation of novel tools that realize objectives 1) and 2) to ensure STSs accountability