Flexible Workflows and Compliance: A Solvable Contradiction?!

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

“…In this context, a compliance process is defined as an independent process (part) consisting of at least one compliance-related activity that satisfies a compliance requirement (Seyffarth et al, 2017a). Whenever a business process activity is affected by a compliance requirement, a corresponding compliance process can be integrated in the business process (Sackmann & Kittel, 2015;Schumm et al, 2010a). Further, a compliance requirement can be satisfied by numerous alternative compliance processes.…”

“…Each compliant process fragment serves to fulfil a compliance requirement. The fragments can be integrated into the business process either at design time or during run time (Sackmann & Kittel, 2015;Schumm et al, 2010a). The separate modelling and storage of fragments offers the possibility for reuse in different business process models.…”

“…In general, the modelling of alternative compliance processes during design time of the business process model (e.g. (Kittel et al, 2013;Sackmann & Kittel, 2015;Schumm et al, 2010b)) is based on two ideas:…”

“…In dynamic markets, the rapid adaption of business activities and processes to such changes is seen as a competitive advantage (Rinderle et al, 2004). Thus, the fast detection of demanding compliance requirements (prior to a compliance breach) and violated compliance requirements (subsequent to a compliance breach) as well as the related adaption of business processes for maintaining compliance are important tasks (Sackmann & Kittel, 2015). However, due to the steadily rising level of regulation and increasingly complex business process models and IT architectures, this is becoming a challenging and time-consuming manual task (Elgammal et al, 2010;Ghanavati et al, 2009).…”