Legitimacy Checking in Communicative Workflow Design

Communicative workflow modelling is key to describing, analyzing, and designing business processes in virtual collaborative networks, such as present in e-commerce. To make workflow models meaningful and acceptable to all partners, their legitimacy needs to be checked. To this purpose, the underlying norms must be made explicit. A key class of communicative workflow models is captured by our extended workflow loop. Using this loop as the basic unit of analysis, we introduce the concept of workflow loop norms, grounded in, amongst others, internal control theory. Workflow loop schemas are used to represent workflow situations, allowing for actual or proposed situations to be matched with the norms. Using these constructs, we outline our legitimacy checking process for workflow designs, and illustrate it with a case.