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Demiton

Governance

Governance ensures critical operations follow organizational policies before execution. In enterprise environments, certain actions require additional validation — financial postings, vendor creation, large transactions.

Governance steps

Workflows use the GOVERN verb to evaluate policies:

GOVERN → payment_approval_policy

If policy conditions are satisfied, the workflow continues. If the policy fails, the workflow suspends and awaits manual approval.

Suspension model

When governance requires manual approval:

  1. Execution pauses at the GOVERN step
  2. Workflow state is persisted to the database
  3. An approval request is created and surfaced to authorized users
  4. Once approved, execution resumes from the suspended step

Approvals are scoped by identity — only users with the required role or group membership can approve.

Approval rules

Governance policies may require:

  • a specific user role
  • membership in a designated approval group
  • multiple approvers for high-value operations
  • time-bounded approvals (expire after N hours)

Audit trail

All governance decisions are recorded in the execution log:

  • identity of the approver
  • approval timestamp
  • workflow run identifier
  • policy evaluated

This provides a complete, immutable audit trail for governance decisions.

Common governance workflows

  • Approving financial postings above a threshold
  • Validating project cost changes before ERP write
  • Approving vendor creation
  • Reviewing payroll submissions before release

Design principle

Governance is the control layer between automation and organizational policy. By embedding governance checks into workflows, automation remains aligned with enterprise controls without requiring manual data entry at every step.