From Digital Accountability to Accountable Digitality Through Needs-Aware Information Systems: The Case of Auditable Child-Welfare Judgments

📅 2026-09-10
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🤖 AI Summary
本文探讨如何通过需求感知信息系统使儿童福利判决等人类机构更透明、可审计,从而提高其责任性。
📝 Abstract
Digital accountability research asks how digital systems can, among other aims, be made transparent, explainable, auditable, contestable, and supportive of ongoing learning and improvement. This paper reverses the question: how can digital transformation make established human institutions more accountable? It theorizes this reversal as accountable digitality and specifies needs-aware information systems as the mediating mechanism. The hard and paradigmatic case is child-welfare judgment, where best-interest procedures must protect children, preserve confidentiality, and respect judicial independence while enabling aggregate learning about needs, reasons, exceptions, and disparities. The case is used diagnostically and illustratively to derive and examine the design logic, not as empirical evidence or validation. Conceptual design-oriented analysis decomposes and recombines digital and legal accountability under child-rights constraints, deriving a canonical theory-to-design chain, contingent mechanisms, implications, and safeguards. It advances IS responsibility and ethics research by showing how privacy-preserving, co-created, needs-aware information systems can support institutional self-knowledge and auditable justice.
Problem

Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.

digital accountability
accountable digitality
needs-aware information systems
child-welfare judgments
Innovation

Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.

accountable digitality
needs-aware information systems
privacy-preserving
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S
Soheil Human
Vienna University of Economics and Business, Vienna, Austria; IT:U Interdisciplinary Transformation University Austria, Linz, Austria; Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands