Measurement of Compliance Distance in Business Processes

Abstract Ensuring that work practice is compliant to regulations and industrial standards is an increasingly important issue in business systems. Whereas as an understanding of control objectives that stem from various legislative, standard and contractual sources may be found at strategic or tactical levels, an assessment of their effective adoption in operational practices is extremely hard. In this paper, we propose a method for assessing the level of compliance in business work practice. The method builds upon business process management platforms, and provides the ability to objectively measure the compliance distance of existing processes within the organization. This in turn empowers process designers and business analysts to quantify the effort required to achieve a compliant process.