Veröffentlichung

Titel:

"The System Did It": Bias, Opacity, and the Misalignment of Ethical Mitigations in (Robotic) Process Automation

AutorInnen:

Leo Poss
Christopher Julian Kern
Julia Krönung
Stefan Schönig

Kategorie:

Beiträge in referierten Konferenzbänden

erschienen in:

Kluza, K., et al. Business Process Management: Responsible BPM Forum, Process Technology Forum, Educators Forum. BPM 2026. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 600. Springer, Cham., pp 44-60

Abstract:

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Agentic AI are reshaping business processes, but their ethical governance lags behind deployment. Based on a scoping review of 29 papers that establishes the general, cross-sector landscape of ethical issues and mitigation strategies, and a municipal focus group that serves as an example case why these generally proposed mitigations fail in practice, we identify five recurring ethical issues (loss of autonomy, opacity, bias, responsibility diffusion, privacy) and four mitigation strategies (human-in-the-loop, audit logs, explainable interfaces, impact assessments). Loss of autonomy is the most-cited concern (62%), yet it attracts the least targeted mitigation, while algorithmic bias (14%) commands the most. The focus group confirms this asymmetry and reveals that even well-understood mitigations depend on organizational resources, governance maturity, and cross-departmental collaboration, factors that the literature fails to explore. The result is a framework of socio-technical governance mechanisms that translates abstract ethical principles into actionable guidance for responsible process automation.

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