Machine responsibility-how to deal with it

IT systems play an ever increasing role in business, commerce, government and services, and can be involved in making decisions that carry enormous implications. This implies that these machines carry responsibility for those decisions and for their outcomes. This paper considers the implications of such "machine responsibility" both for the enterprise concerned and for the IT system, and how the issues involved can be addressed through enterprise modelling using the Enterprise Language of the Reference Model for Open Distributed Processing (RM-ODP) as part of an overall system specification approach.