Accountability and Responsibility in Business Processes via Agent Technology

Business processes are widely used to capture how a service is realized or a product is delivered by a set of combined tasks. It is a recommended practice to implement a business goal through a single business process; in many cases, however, this is impossible or it is not efficient. The choice is, then, to split the process into a number of interacting processes. In order to realize this kind of solution, the business goal is broken up and distributed through many “actors”, who will depend on one another in carrying out their tasks. We explain, in this work, some weaknesses that emerge in this picture, and also how they would be overcome by introducing an explicit representation of responsibilities and accountabilities. We rely, as a running example, on the Hiring Process as described by Silver in [30].