Business process compliance checking: Current state and future challenges

Abstract

Regulatory compliance sets new requirements for business process management (BPM). Companies seek to enhance their corporate governance processes and are required to put in place measures for ensuring compliance to regulations. In this sense, this position paper (i) reviews the current work in the context of BPM systems and (ii) suggests future directions to improve the current status. During the literature review, techniques are classified as supporting forward or backward compliance. The latter is a post-execution compliance (i.e. based on execution histories of systems) and the former takes place at designor run-time. In a nutshell, this position paper claims that four main aspects need to be incorporated by current compliance checking techniques: (i) an integrated approach able to cover the full BPM life-cycle, (ii) the support for compliance checks beyond control-flow-related aspects, (iii) intuitive graphical notations for business analysts, and (iv) embedding semantic technologies during the definition, deployment and executions of compliance checks.