Making Accountability Visible Using I.T.: From Command-and-Control to Bounded, Empowered Coordination

Empowerment is a key component of the Sense-and-Respond design for an adaptive
enterprise. Within bounds set by the enterprise leadership, individuals are given the
authority to choose the most appropriate means (procedure) for the situation at hand.
This recognizes that the representative of the enterprise in direct contact with a specific
customer, and individuals in the community supporting that representative, have the
greatest understanding of the company’s one-on-one relationship with that customer.

The rise in empowerment in the workplace has muddied accountabilities for outcomes.
The industrial age model of work-as-procedure had clear accountabilities: the supervisor
specified the procedure, and the worker executed it. In the knowledge economy, Haeckel
and Scherr have observed, an empowerment model requires a shift from accountability
for executing a procedure to accountability for producing an outcome. Accountabilities
are negotiated between individuals their in roles as customer or supplier.

Accountability brings issues of explicitness -- the need to write things down between the
parties involved -- and disambiguation -- the need to become clear about a desired
outcome, and any associated conditions of satisfaction. Within any enterprise of a scale
beyond continually face-to-face communication, particularly where economies of scope
are sought, information technology support for accountability is essential.

This paper explores how to design and deploy information technology support for
accountability in general, and for the case of bounded empowerment in particular.
Explicitness and disambiguation would both appear to be laudable goals. However,
deeper accounts of the nature of organizational work and its computer-based support --
such as Wenger’s maxim that "practice is not the result of design but rather a response to
it" -- suggest that caution is appropriate. We review the literature on work practice,
accounts and accountability, and "technologies of accountability" to suggest directions
for the transformation of enterprise information technology support systems.