Maintaining business process compliance despite changes: a decision support approach based on process adaptations

Abstract

The term compliance essentially refers to ensuring that business processes, operations and practices conform to an agreed set of rules. Such rules can influence both business processes and components of an information technology (IT) architecture, resulting in relationships between (1) compliance requirements, (2) process elements and (3) IT components. Whenever one element of these three classes is changed, e.g. when outsourcing decisions are made, a relationship analysis becomes necessary in order to identify demanding and violated compliance requirements. Since a manual relationship analysis is a complicated and elaborate task, the paper at hand presents methods to 1) automatically identify potential compliance violations in the context of changes and 2) automatically propose process adaptions for maintaining or re-establishing compliance. The methods are implemented as a software artefact, evaluated as useful in the context of an expert survey and contribute to the support of process adaptation decisions for maintaining compliance following changes.