Recent research in the field of information systems (IS) has highlighted emerging and changing demands for the accountability of organizations. Accountability, it seems, shifts from stakeholders imposing upon organizations performance measures and various schemes to being a more dynamic practice within which different expectations arise, and organizations are demanded to give and receive various accounts. Our paper is focused on how organizations leverage data; ‘data objects’ (Alaimo & Kallinikos, 2021b) in particular, to produce such shifts in accountability. Through an empirical investigation of a German health care organization, we foreground the production of these shifts to be a tension-laden process wherein layering, undermining, and producing unintended accountability play out as a struggle involving a push forward and push back across different forms of accountability. Our work and according theorizing of how data objects help with producing shifts in accountability offer contributions to recent literatures about accountability and digital technology, data objects, and the more circumscribed and recent literatures about accountable care organizations (ACOs) in IS and health policy.
