Abstract

Digital infrastructures increasingly coordinate action across organisational boundaries where authority is plural, legitimacy is distributed, and responsibility is contested. In such contexts, breakdowns arise less from data inaccuracy than from weak institutional accountability: systems record what happened but fail to preserve who acted in which role, under what mandate, for what declared purpose, and with what rights of challenge. We argue that this deficit represents a contemporary design science problem of growing complexity, because accountability in plural-authority settings must be designed across interacting operational, organisational, and institutional levels. This paper develops a formal design theory for a class of artifacts termed institutional digital infrastructures. Grounded in a minimal triadic structure of accountable action—actor, instrumented act, and recognised institutional framing—the theory specifies how accountability can be embedded architecturally through role-mediated sessions, publication-centric representation, provenance-by-construction, and archetype-governed evolution. In doing so, the paper positions accountability not as an external governance overlay, but as a designable property of complex digital infrastructures. The design theory is instantiated and structurally evaluated through the Durham & DarlingtonElectronic Health Record project, which operationalised federation, publication-based consent, and structured provenance in a regional health and social care community. The instantiation demonstrates how accountability can be embedded without centralised custodianship. The paper contributes by extending design science research to a complex, multi-echelon artifact class, advancing platform and digital infrastructure design by treating governance and accountability as architectural properties, and providing a concrete alternative to integrationist record paradigms for federated institutional infrastructures.

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