Responsibility modelling as a technique for organisational requirements definition

The aim is to show how responsibility modelling can be used as a means of specifying requirements on an IT system in a way that is meaningful to both users and systems designers. The authors show how obligations define what a responsibility holder must do, and how these can be divided into those that must be done by people and those that are transferable on to the IT system, thus creating functional requirements on that system. By listing what a responsibility holder needs to know and needs to record one can create lists of information requirements. The authors also show how organisational structure may be interpreted in terms of responsibility relationship, and therefore how a model of responsibilities and their associated obligations not only represents function but also the context within the organisational structure in which the responsibility is held. This has direct bearing on whether the responsibility holder holds the necessary authorisation and capability tokens to access the information resources required. The use of a clinical workstation in acute hospitals is given as an example of responsibility modelling