The process of transforming regulatory provisions into specifications for information systems

Join us for the January Institutional Grammar Research Initiative (IGRI) virtual research seminar, where Martha Avila of the University at Albany will present "The process of transforming regulatory provisions into specifications for information systems."

Governments enact policies and regulations to guide organizations in achieving their goals. The assumption is that organizations will succeed in their goals if the rules are correctly implemented. In addition to training humans to understand and observe rules, organizations rely on their information systems (IS) to execute or impede actions that help them to comply with the rules.

Since rules are not designed to be machine-readable, it is not feasible to translate them directly into specifications for IS. Organizations must perform requirement analysis and extraction processes followed by validation of their alignment and compliance. This qualitative research focuses on how organizations follow, adopt, and construct institutions in the process of incorporating rules into their IS. Despite its inherent complexity and the need for scrutiny, this process has received little attention from organizational and legal perspectives.

The case study will be the health data quality rules used in the New York State Child Welfare Information System. I will use Institutional Grammar 2.0, to extract the deontic meaning from the mentioned rules, synthesize them, and analyze their consistency. I will use the Institutional Analysis and Development framework for making explicit the interplay between governance arrangements that guide the transformation of regulatory provisions into specifications for information systems.

The IGRI is an independent affiliate of the Center for Policy Design and Governance.