A Taxonomy of Business Rule Organizing Approaches in Regard to Business Process Compliance

Abstract

Business Process Compliance (BPC) bridges the disciplines of Business Process Management and Compliance Management, and is aimed to ensure that business processes are aligned with laws and regulations. In this context, business rules are used as a central means to represent regulatory policies and consequently to (automatedly) verify, whether business process models abide by respective rules. While there has been a plethora of works regarding this actual verification of process models relative to business rules, we see a strong lack of works regarding the actual creation and maintenance of business rules. More precisely, many works assume sound sets of business rules as a basis for subsequent techniques. However, recent works suggest this assumption cannot be made in practice, and companies actually need to be supported in the scope of managing and organizing business rules, e.g., to remove redundant or contradictory rules. Organizing business rules is a mandatory prerequisite to BPC, as errors in business rules make these rule bases unusable and impede a subsequent verification of process compliance. However, the literature on business rule organization is sparse - especially its relation to BPC. We therefore investigate how to harmonize company efforts in business rule organization and BPC by the means of a systematic literature review. The main contribution of this work is a guideline which supports companies to select appropriate rule organization approaches based on company BPC needs. Also, we identify research gaps and propose a corresponding research agenda based on our findings.