Compliance Management in Business Processes

Business Process Compliance refers to the act of conformance of a business process with policies, regulations and rules that govern the organization. An imperative requirement of business processes in various fields such as Health care, Insurance, Finance and Online Trade is adherence to a large number of compliance requirements, constraints and quality policies from various sources. Lack of compliance may result in huge compensations and loss of customers and reputation. Compliance issues can be handled either retrospectively i.e. after non-complaint situations are observed or they can be handled proactively i.e. anticipation of possibilities leading to non-compliant circumstances during process execution which may prevent occurrence of deviations and thus save upon compensation effects. Hence compliance management tasks need to be incorporated into each phase of the life-cycle of a business process. In this article we discuss contemporary activities related to lifecycle of compliance management in business processes which involve compliance elicitation, compliance formalization, compliance implementation, compliance verification and compliance improvement based on existing literature. Compliance Monitoring Functionalities (CMFs) which may be used to categorize and also assess existing compliance management approaches and frameworks are also discussed.