#eavoices

24 days ago

On ‘shared-enterprise’

What exactly is ‘the enterprise’ in enterprise-architecture? To what extent is that enterprise a shared-enterprise? And how does this affect enterprise-architecture itself? These questions have come up a lot in the past few weeks, in back-and-forth conversations on LinkedIn and elsewhere. The…

27 days ago

With Strings Attached

@rachelcoldicutt notes that “Google Docs new grammar suggestion tool doesn’t like the word ‘funding’ and prefers ‘investment’ “.Many business people have an accounting mindset, in which all expenditure must be justified in terms of benefit to the organ…

1 month ago

The Open Group Open Subsurface Data Universe™ (OSDU) Forum Update

The Professional Petroleum Data Expo was held April in Houston by the Professional Petroleum Data Management Association (PPDM). This conference is one of several events this spring where The Open Group Open Subsurface Data Universe™ (OSDU) Forum unveiled a new standard in development that will facilitate movement of oil and gas company exploration, production, and wells data from in-house IT systems to cloud services.

The Open Group was a sponsor of the event, and had a presence in the exhibition hall. There was a steady stream of attendees with questions about the Open Subsurface Data Universe Forum, and about the emerging standard.

1 month, 3 days ago

The Road Less Travelled

Are algorithms trustworthy, asks @NizanGP.”Many of us routinely – and even blindly – rely on the advice of algorithms in all aspects of our lives, from choosing the fastest route to the airport to deciding how to invest our retirement savings. But shou…

1 month, 13 days ago

Dump the financial incentives!

If you want to understand what our enterprise-architecture disciplines really need to be able to address, take a good long look at the healthcare context. Complexity of every possible kind: whole-of-system interactions, interweaving lifecycles, the urgent mixed in with the long-term –…

1 month, 21 days ago

Five Elements of Responsibility by Design

I have been developing an approach to #TechnologyEthics, which I call #ResponsibilityByDesign. It is based on the five elements of #VPECT. Let me start with a high-level summary before diving into some of the detail.


Values

  • Why does ethics matter?
  • What outcomes for whom?

Policies

  • Principles and practices of technology ethics
  • Formal codes of practice, etc. Regulation.

Event-Driven (Activity Viewpoint)

  • Effective and appropriate action at different points: planning; risk assessment; design; verification, validation and test; deployment; operation; incident management; retirement. (Also known as the Process Viewpoint). 

Content (Knowledge Viewpoint)

  • What matters from an ethical point of view? What issues do we need to pay attention to?
  • Where is the body of knowledge and evidence that we can reference?

Trust (Responsibility Viewpoint)

  • Transparency and governance
  • Responsibility, Authority, Expertise, Work (RAEW)

Concerning technology ethics, there is a lot of recent published material on each of these elements separately, but I have not yet found much work that puts them together in a satisfactory way. Many working groups concentrate on a single element – for example, principles or transparency. And even when experts link multiple elements, the logical connections aren’t always spelled out.

At the time of writing this post (May 2019), I haven’t yet fully worked out how to join these elements either, and I shall welcome constructive feedback from readers and pointers to good work elsewhere. I am also keen to find opportunities to trial these ideas on real projects.

Related Posts

Responsibility by Design (June 2018) What is Responsibility by Design (October 2018) Why Responsibility by Design Now? (October 2018)

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