Are we done with business process compliance: state of the art and challenges ahead

Literature on business process compliance (BPC) has predominantly focused on the alignment of the regulatory rules with the design, verification and validation of business processes. Previously, surveys on BPC have been conducted with specific context in mind; however, the literature on BPC management research is largely sparse and does not accumulate a detailed understanding on existing literature and related issues faced by the domain. This survey provides a holistic view of the literature on existing BPC management approaches and categorises them based on different compliance management strategies in the context of formulated research questions. A systematic literature approach is used where search terms pertaining keywords were used to identify literature related to the research questions from scholarly databases. From initially 183 papers, we selected 79 papers related to the themes of this survey published between 2000 and 2015. The survey results reveal that mostly compliance management approaches centre around three distinct categories, namely design-time ($$28\%$$28%), run-time ($$32\%$$32%) and auditing ($$10\%$$10%). Also, organisational and internal control-based compliance management frameworks ($$21\%$$21%) and hybrid approaches make ($$9\%$$9%) of the surveyed approaches. Furthermore, open research challenges and gaps are identified and discussed with respect to the compliance problem.