Towards Supporting Business Process Compliance with Policies

Abstract

This paper discusses early findings of the research in progress to create an approach to support an organization in bridging the gap between existing business processes and policies. Business processes are valuable assets of any organization, and business process modelling has become the key activity for capturing and analysing business processes. However, advances in technology, growing expectation of openness by research funders, competition, regulations in IT security and privacy, and overall economic situation facilitate emergence of new policies, and urge enterprises to change their business processes to be compliant with the new requirements. The goal of the research is to propose the approach for closing the gap between business process models and legal states of business objects described in policies by means of using Bunge-Wand-Weber model. The approach includes means for explicit definition of legal and illegal state spaces of business objects in (1) policies, and (2) as-is business process models, and compliance checking between state spaces of (1) and (2) to indicate the gap. It is an initial input for building to-be business process models that are complaint with newly imposed policies. As a running example to illustrate the approach a publishing business process of a scholar journal is used. New policies from research funders require Open Access (OA) to all outputs from publiclyfunded research, and business processes of publishing scholar journals require changes.