Measuring the compliance of processes with reference models

Abstract

Reference models provide a set of generally accepted best practices to create efficient processes to be deployed inside organizations. However, a central challenge is to determine how these best practices are implemented in practice. One limitation of existing approaches for measuring compliance is the assumption that the compliance can be determined using the notion of process equivalence. Nonetheless, the use of equivalence algorithms is not adequate since two models can have different structures but one process can still be compliant with the other. This paper presents a new approach and algorithm which allow to measure the compliance of process models with reference models. We evaluate our approach by measuring the compliance of a model currently used by a German passenger airline with the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) reference model and by comparing our results with existing approaches. © Springer-Verlag 2009.