Causal and consequential responsibility

1. Causal and consequential responsibility

2. Scoping responsibility • Concerned with the notion of responsibility in socio-technical systems • This does not have to encompass broader notions of responsibility • Parents are responsible for bringing up children • Home Secretary is responsible for national security

3. Goal • Discover useful ways in which identifying and describing responsibilities can contribute to system dependability • Do this without requiring undue complexity or cost • Integrate, where possible, with other dependability-related activities

4. System goals • It is assumed that there are a number of goals associated with a system • The goal of the system is to improve access to patients’ medical records • In a dependability case, these goals may be associated with claims • Goal: Discover all failure modes • Claim: All failure modes identified

5. Dependability cases • Dependability cases are justifications for a belief that a certain level of dependability has been achieved • They include • Claims - a statement of some thing.It might be thought of as the achievement of a goal • Evidence - information to back up that statement • Arguments - arguments why the evidence backs up the statement

6. Proposal • Associate consequential and causal responsibility information with dependability cases • Documents and makes explicit who is responsible for what • Reveals unassigned responsibilities • Provides a basis for responsibility discussions • Clearly relates responsibility to dependability

7. Consequential responsibility • Who gets the blame if a goal is not reached. • Always associated with an organisation/role/person not an automated system • In general, responsibilities can be recast as responsibilities for some goal • X is responsible for financial management • Goal: Ensure expenditure is lower than income

8. Shared responsibility • Shared consequential responsibility for some goal is common in multi-organisation system procurements • A possible source of error is when this responsibility is broken down according to evidence required

9. Causal responsibility • Causal responsibility can be considered (in this limited discussion) as the responsibility for doing something. • This can generally be recast as the responsibility for enacting some process (possibly not explicitly defined). • Consequential responsibilities always have associated causal responsibilities (although the responsibles may be different)

10. Accountability • If X is consequentially responsible for something, then they may be required to maintain evidence of how they have discharged that responsibility • This evidence corresponds to the evidence that may be required to back up a claim in a dependability case

11. Evidence • The construction/modification of evidence involves acts of creation • If X is consequentially responsible for goal G then X is consequentially responsible for the acts of creation of the evidence supporting the achievement of the goal • This does NOT mean that X has to create the evidence (tho’ this could be a default assumption) but that X gets the blame if the evidence isn’t there or isn’t up to standard

12. Example • Alice is responsible for undergraduate admissions in a university dept. She has an assistant (Bob). • Goal • Admit an appropriate number of properly qualified students to the department in each academic year • Sub-goals • Meet admissions targets • Handle admissions according to policy • Process admission requests promptly

13. Associated actions • Define a process for handling applications • Assign responsibilities for enacting parts of the process to Alice and Bob • Ensure that Bob and others have the competence and resources to discharge their responsibilities • Enact the defined process

14. Evidence • A process description of an admissions process • Notes of a meeting assigning responsibilities • Training notes explaining what must be done by actors in the process • Records of process enactment (e.g. completed fields in form)

15. Consequential responsibility failures • Failure to assign consequential responsibility (to a role) • Failure to identify (adequate) evidence of discharge of responsibility • Misunderstanding of consequential responsibility • Failure to translate consequential to causal responsibility

16. Causal responsibility • Causal responsibility is the responsibility to enact some process • Two types of causal responsibility • Responsibility to enact the process in ‘normal’ situations • Responsibility to deal with exceptions

17. Causal responsibility failures • Responsibility misunderstanding • Lack of competence • Lack of time • Lack of resources • Unassigned responsibility • Responsibility conflict

18. Responsibility models • Consequential responsibility is a relation between a role/agent and a goal. • Causal responsibility is a relation between a role/agent and a process. • There are processes of creation associated with evidence. Each process has an implicit goal (Successfully do it) hence a responsible. • Processes also have causal responsibles who are responsible for enacting the process. • One or more responsibles may be assigned a responsibility.

19. Notation Association Goal Consequential responsibility Causal responsibility (Normal) Evidence Causal responsibility (Exception) Process Causal + Consequential resp.

20. Cliff All DIRC papers on BSCW All Lancs papers on BSCW … All Ed. Papers on BSCW Ian Stuart Maintain publicationsdatabase Helen Chris DIRC Lancspaper list BSCW directorylisting Ian, Jo, Dave …. Submit papers to BSCW ??

21. Assign a bed to patients within 1 hour of admission Report preparation Bed allocation Admission Hospital DirectorBed manager Bed manager Waiting time report Bed DB Admission records Admissions sec. PIMS Admissions manager

22. What next? • Modelling the responsibility (rather than the allocation of responsibilities) • Description, Competences, Resources required, Constraints, Etc. • Modelling responsibility sharing (transfer, delegation, inter-organisational)