Authorities represent the Veracity for corporate decisions
Veracity is not a core element of AM but is pivotal in its understanding.
Business design is largely dependent on the risk of believing your business stakeholders. If an information source is in question, businesses find (or not), corroborating evidence. These monitoring assertions must be built into the business design. When these sources are external it may be that the external entity have an asserted contract in place and rely on regular payment assertions. Like a credit agency.
It is for this reason that Authorities are included as a key element in Assertion Modeling.
An Authority speaks for an organization
When Assertion Modeling is used to model business endeavors the Authority makes decisions for a legal entity. If the Authority is an employee, then their decisions may deliver information within or outside the entity. When an Authority issues information to outside organization the Authority is responsible for that statement. Within an organization, an employee may have responsibilities as part of the employee agreement. The agreement provides constraints on what statements they make, perhaps even their private statements made in private.
Authorities emit assertions from within Environments
The Environment where an Authority receives, and delivers, communications is an important part of understanding and describing a business endeavour.
Where two environments make communication difficult, passing of that information becomes a key component of business design. For an example, an applicant working within their own Environment, provided by a device, will be able to make a statement that represents a job application if the device offers a MSWord or e-mail and Environment. Then they can communicate via e-mail.
If the organization has implemented that job application assertion in a web application environment, then the job applicant can operate within that provided environment. This can simplify, and make more efficient, the relationship between the two Authorities.
Latency does not now depend on authorities accessing their e-mail stack. Authorities and environments are key factors in making business design decisions.
Authorities are not employee positions, or employees themselves
In Assertion Modeling, Authorities are perceived as responsibilities that can be assigned to employees. Not as employees themselves. In this regard they differ from the concepts of actors, rules, etc. They have a stronger relationship to responsibilities or duties. It may be that a job description includes a set of assertions that the position must perform.
The Assertions include Specifications, statements that describe and constrain how they make decisions on behalf of the organization. These Assertion Specifications are the standard operating procedures (SOPs) of the organization. If an employee contract specifies adherence to these conditions, the information from them constitute corporate records. Assertions that create this Record information are identified as such. And connections our of them deliver corporate records.
Use Authorities to help design your business
For designing organizations these constraints are significant factors in organizational design. And capturing these as part of an Assertion Model that is being used for changing organizational design means that all the information needed to make organisations design decisions is available to try out different configurations of responsibilities and to optimize them.
Automatic Assertions still have an Authority
When a business rule is written, or computer code is written to automate and move information, this should not make the Authority anonymous the responsibility for that automated decision still must be assigned.
In some cases the implementation of a business rule is assigned to a technical responsibility. This does not pass the responsibility for the decision itself. There must be an Authority that conceives, rights, and specifies the decision to be automated. This approach is recognized in the duty with formal ways of specifying those business rules, particularly in the discipline of DMN and business rule engine’s
Authorities may need help in managing their input information, and configuring their output statements
In Assertion Modelling the responsibility of making the determination can be made easier by arranging this input information. Or in providing a way of helping the Authority arrange, filter and query those inputs. Similarly, assistance can be provided to assist the configuration of the outputs.
This assistance is called Augmentation. It bridges the gap between fully manual assertions and fully automated assertions. It is often the case that providing this augmentation is delivered by software features that support the Authority in concentrating on the meaning and accuracy of the information they produce, rather than the mechanics of arranging it.
The Authority configures that output continually refining it within the Assertion until it is ready to be emitted.