A Deontic Analysis of Inter-Organizational Control Requirements

Authors

Vu Nguyen, Florida International UniversityFollow

Document Type

Dissertation

Major/Program

Business Administration

First Advisor's Name

Ronald M. Lee

First Advisor's Committee Title

Committee Chair

Second Advisor's Name

Anastasia Pagnoni

Second Advisor's Committee Title

Committee Member

Third Advisor's Name

Debra VanderMeer

Third Advisor's Committee Title

Committee Member

Fourth Advisor's Name

Kaushik Dutta

Fourth Advisor's Committee Title

Committee Member

Fifth Advisor's Name

Xudong He

Fifth Advisor's Committee Title

Committee Member

Keywords

formal modeling, business process, procedure, control, Deontic, redesign

Date of Defense

5-28-2008

Abstract

This research focuses on the design and verification of inter-organizational controls. Instead of looking at a documentary procedure, which is the flow of documents and data among the parties, the research examines the underlying deontic purpose of the procedure, the so-called deontic process, and identifies control requirements to secure this purpose. The vision of the research is a formal theory for streamlining bureaucracy in business and government procedures. Underpinning most inter-organizational procedures are deontic relations, which are about rights and obligations of the parties. When all parties trust each other, they are willing to fulfill their obligations and honor the counter parties’ rights; thus controls may not be needed. The challenge is in cases where trust may not be assumed. In these cases, the parties need to rely on explicit controls to reduce their exposure to the risk of opportunism. However, at present there is no analytic approach or technique to determine which controls are needed for a given contracting or governance situation. The research proposes a formal method for deriving inter-organizational control requirements based on static analysis of deontic relations and dynamic analysis of deontic changes. The formal method will take a deontic process model of an inter-organizational transaction and certain domain knowledge as inputs to automatically generate control requirements that a documentary procedure needs to satisfy in order to limit fraud potentials. The deliverables of the research include a formal representation namely Deontic Petri Nets that combine multiple modal logics and Petri nets for modeling deontic processes, a set of control principles that represent an initial formal theory on the relationships between deontic processes and documentary procedures, and a working prototype that uses model checking technique to identify fraud potentials in a deontic process and generate control requirements to limit them. Fourteen scenarios of two well-known international payment procedures -- cash in advance and documentary credit -- have been used to test the prototype. The results showed that all control requirements stipulated in these procedures could be derived automatically.

Identifier

FI08121910

Recommended Citation

Nguyen, Vu, "A Deontic Analysis of Inter-Organizational Control Requirements" (2008). FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 69.
https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/etd/69