Dealing with imprecise compliance requirements

Business process compliance management is a field of study involving the co-ordination of business process management and compliance systems. A compliance system is an organisation wide tool that links legislative and business rules to organization policies and processes. The objective of such a system is to promote a self sustaining level of operations that minimizes the losses caused to the business through breaches of laws or internal misappropriations. We view a compliance system in a similar fashion to that of an accounting system where each process is treated as a transaction. Each process may be monitored and valuations of costing and benefits associated to each task. Both high order policy creation as well as low order transactional histories of single processes must be considered to obtain a complete picture of current operations. In this paper we discuss benefits and shortcomings in some of the currently implemented compliance schemes and present a method for measuring the degree of compliance that each business process may achieve.