Thanks to the recent technological advancements, enterprises can now be seen through the paradigm of the Sociotechnical Systems (STSs): complex systems in which human beings interact with each other by means of ICT infrastructures. In STSs human beings (the enterprise’s stakeholders) are the central elements of the system: human users, in fact, are essential to deliver the business goals of the enterprise. This, indeed, is the main difference between a technical (computer-based) system – where no user is necessary to obtain a result – and an STS – in which humans’ decisions and actions move the enterprise towards its objectives. Dealing with STSs, one has to consider three important characteristics. First of all, since users are people who are influenced by the way the enterprise is managed and by their interactions with other people inside and outside of the enterprise, an STS may exhibit emergent properties that are properties of the system as a whole, rather than of its individual components. Second, STSs are nondeterministic: given the same inputs, they could produce different outputs. The reason for this stems, of course, from the unpredictability of human behaviour: human operators could react in different ways to similar situations. Third, the achievement of the enterprise’s objectives does not depend just on how the enterprise is organized (e.g., in terms of its business processes), but also on how stable these objectives are, and on how people in the enterprise interpret these objectives and react to possibly conflicting interactions.

An enterprise thus, being an STS, is characterized by (just partially predictable) actors, which are either humans or software components acting on behalf of humans. It is precisely because of the autonomy that characterizes the actors of an STS, that accountability becomes a critical and predominant feature of the enterprise. Accountability encompasses the tracking down of responsibilities for actions and decisions taken within the enterprise. So far, however, accountability has not received the attention it deserves; AThOS (Accountable Trustworthy Organizations and Systems) aims at filling this gap by formalizing and developing a completely novel methodology for enforcing accountability in STSs. Before presenting the intuitions underpinning AThOS, we briefly sketch the reasons why accountability cannot be achieved by means of the available technologies.