Abstract
This paper is primarily aimed at professionals who have been involved in “architecting” large scale, multi-agency socio-technical systems particularly in the areas of care and wellbeing. Their work has been situated at the interface between management, practice, public sector commissioning and legal, regulatory and statutory matters, in the context of data and communications platforms and environments. This is a context which has been prone to outright failure and under performance for many years. Seasoned, systems practitioners often wonder “why does it all go so horribly wrong so regularly?” The standard response is to try to identify mishaps and mistakes and to assign blame, but the fundamental nature and adequacy of our information and communications systems paradigms is rarely questioned. The background to this paper assumes that this failure is due to a fundamental mismatch between the real world, emergent complexities that are being addressed and the limitations of the architectural paradigms which are built into current technical, legal and commercial practices.
This paper represents an attempt to identify a practical path toward a better way of deploying and governing the platforms that support the delivery of relational and transactional services. The path suggested, builds on, and extends, an important and long-standing strand of thinking in IS based on the Language Action Perspective which represents a rejection of the narrow functionalist and process/data driven approaches and adopts a more communications oriented approach to socio-technical processes.
We explore the architecture for a proposed Trustworthy Governable Platform (TGP), able to deliver systemic responses to delicate social dimensions, such as accountability (the reliable attribution of credit and blame in relation to outcomes), and contextual integrity (respect of privacy and the uses that are made of personal information) in dynamically evolving, multi-agency settings of business and public service. Since the requirements that the TGP architecture attempts to address are those of human relationality, at a very fundamental level, we look to Heidegger to provide our philosophical underpinnings..
Recommended Citation
Martin, Mike and Jacucci, Gianni, "The Trustworthy, Governable Platform: A New Approach to applying the Language Action Perspective and Relational Design." (2025). OISI Workshop 2025. 9.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/oisiworkshop2025/9