Value-sensitive design for cross-enterprise regulation

Abstract

The pressure to increase organizational transparency, the rise of proper IT support for regulative activities and the increasing cost of regulation are a few notable drivers that stress the significance of cross-enterprise regulation. Compliance to regulations fuels the added-value that business processes represent and prevents judiciary pursuits. Norm enforcement mechanisms are used to determine whether organizations have complied with the regulations or norms, which can be divided into mechanisms that are oriented towards direct control and mechanisms that are oriented towards self regulation. When designing a system to support agents in norm fulfillment and enforcement, the relation between norm enforcement mechanisms and the abstract values that are behind them should be explicitly incorporated in the development of the system. In this paper, a first step in the development of such a value-sensitive system is taken by formalizing the values of direct control and self regulation. The paper also outlines the following steps that are necessary to complete the development of the proposed value-sensitive system process towards a full system implementation. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.