A Quantitative Service Accountability Model

Recently, several global institutions have fallen victim to concerns regarding disclosure and accountability. The most poignant examples are the recent US Wall Street collapse due to the burgeoning effect of Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDO). The key concern for consumers of these services are transparency, disclosure, and trust of the product/services. These are elementary attributes of accountability and in the online world of trading goods and services. Information technology provides the SOA foundation for executing these global transactions. This paper presents a quantitative model to measure and assess accountability in SOA. The proposed model may be applied in practice to assess accountability of a service or process, assisting to strengthen accountability in SOA and general information and communication technology (ICT) solutions that support transactions globally.