The journey to business process compliance

It is a typical scenario that many organisations have their busi-ness processes specified independently of their business obligations (which includes contractual obligations to business partners, as well as obligations a business has to fulfil against regulations and indus-try standards). This is because of the lack of guidelines and tools that facilitate derivation of processes from contracts but also because of the traditional mindset of treating contracts separately from business processes. This chapter will provide a solution to one specific prob-lem that arises from this situation, namely the lack of mechanisms to check whether business processes are compliant with business con-tracts. The chapter begins by defining the space for business process compliance and the eco-system for ensuring that process are compli-ant. The key point is that compliance is a relationship between two sets of specifications: the specifications for executing a business pro-cess and the specifications regulating a business. The central part of the chapter focuses on a logic based formalism for describing both the semantics of normative specifications and the semantics of com-pliance checking procedures.