A flexible compliance auditing framework.

Abstract

Compliance auditing techniques are of high importance for process managers. They provide quantitative metrics to measure to which extent the executed processes are in accordance with the process model. The result is used later as an input to evaluate the organizational performance. Existing techniques, provide one fitness degree regardless of the context in which the fitness degree is measured. Important factors such as the flexibility of execution and the different interpretation for a compliant process have been underestimated in the literature. In this work we present a Flexible Compliance Auditing Framework to support the business world with more applicable metrics. The developed framework provides different semantics for a compliant process. The fitness metrics can be customized according to the process analyst needs. In addition, we introduce the so-called BRCA process modeling language to represent the compliance requirements. The developed framework is implemented and evaluated by means of both a synthesized data set and a real data set. Results show the importance of providing different semantics to measure the fitness degree.