Value-Sensitive Design for Cross-Enterprise Regulation

Over the past several years, the business community has devoted considerable attention to corporate responsibility, in order to address significant social and environmental questions with value for business and society. Organizational activities are expected to be transparent to governments, investors, and other stakeholders. Enterprises, governmental institutions, and the public in general benefit from well-defined and well-enforced laws and legal guidelines, in order to protect companies from manipulations of financial reporting data. Traditionally, control and enforcement were government tasks, however, the advent of sound IT support and the increasing cost and complexity of regulation are leading towards collaborative regulation between enterprises and governments. Regulation of organizational processes is based on the norms that organizations have to comply with. A norm can be defined as standard behavior that is acceptable for the regulating institutions, indicating desirable behaviors that should be carried out as well as undesirable behaviors that should be avoided [4]. Norm enforcement mechanisms are used to determine if organizations have complied to the norms that they should satisfy [1]. If norms are to be enforced, then the institution should specify and handle sanctions for every possible violation of the norms. This means that enforcement mechanisms often require the introduction of special ‘regulator actors’ that actively monitor the behavior of the other agents [1]. Such agents are assigned to monitor the behavior of organizations and sanction them in case of norm violations. Implementing self-regulation as a control mechanism results in a redistribution of control tasks among the actors. Which enforcement mechanisms are effective and how sanctions are likely to be followed is directly related to the values of an organization. Moral values are the standards of good and evil that guide an individual’s behavior and choices [5]. Individuals, groups, and societies develop own value systems used for the purpose of ethical integrity. The value notion and the two mentioned different types of norm enforcement mechanisms can be combined to design a value-sensitive system that supports agents in norm fulfillment and norm enforcement. Value Sensitive Design (VSD) is a methodological design approach that aims at making moral values part of technological design, research, and development [2]. Values are typically high-level abstract concepts that are difficult ∗Published as: Overbeek, S., Dignum, M., Tan, Y.H.: Value-sensitive design for cross-enterprise regulation. In: Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Cross Enterprise Collaboration, People, and Work (CEC-PAW10) held in conjunction with the BPM 2010 Conference, Hoboken, New Jersey, USA, September 13, 2010. 5th SIKS/BENAIS Conference on Enterprise Information Systems