A method for creating digital signature policies.

Increased political pressures towards a more efficient public sector have resulted in the increased proliferation of electronic documents and associated technologies such as Digital Signatures. Whilst Digital Signatures provide electronic document security functions, they do not confer legal meaning of a signature which captures the conditions under which a signature can be deemed to be legally valid. Whilst in the paper-world this information is often communicated implicitly, verbally or through notes within the document itself, in the electronic world a technological tool is required to communicate this meaning; one such technological aid is the Digital Signature Policy. In a transaction where the legality of a signature must be established, a Digital Signature Policy can confer the necessary contextual information that is required to make such a judgment. The Digital Signature Policy captures information such as the terms to which a signatory wishes to bind himself, the actual legal clauses and acts being invoked by the process of signing, the conditions under which a signatory's signature is deemed legally valid and other such information. As this is a relatively new technology, little literature exists on this topic. This research was conducted in an Action Research collaboration with a Spanish Public Sector organisation that sought to introduce Digital Signature Policy technology; their specific research problem was that the production of Digital Signature Policies was time consuming, resource intensive, arduous and suffered from lack of quality. The research therefore sought to develop a new and improved method for creating Digital Signature Policies. The researcher collaborated with the problem owner, as is typical of Participative Action Research. The research resulted in the development of a number of Information Systems artefacts, the development of a method for creating Digital Signature Policies and finally led to a stage where the problem owner could successfully develop the research further without the researcher's further input