The area of business process standardisation is a fairly new research area that has received much attention in recent years, both from the academic field, and from the practitioner field. One problem is that it is difficult for standards user organisations to determine that they have correctly interpreted and implemented a standard. Therefore, a certification instrument would help these organisations to achieve a more effective standardisation process, both with respect to time and effort required, and to the cost associated with implementing a standard. This is thus also the main problem covered by the thesis described in this paper. In order to provide an answer to this problem, five research questions have been identified that together can improve the situation. The intended result is a general certification instrument to be used in, or after, standards implementation. To our knowledge, no similar research projects are currently being undertaken, possibly because standardisation is such a new area of research. This research would therefore be a contribution to the research area as such.
