Modeling and Checking Business Process Compliance Rules in the Financial Sector

Assuring compliance of business processes with legal and internal regulations is crucial for financial institutions, as non-compliance may lead to severe financial and juridical penalties. To ensure business process compliance, process models have been established as a widely accepted basis for the design, documentation and control of the implementation of business process rules. Accordingly, in this paper, we introduce a semi-automatic business process compliance checking approach based on process models and related models. It relies on graph-based pattern matching, which makes it possible in contrast to existing approaches to define and check any possible type of business rule in any possible type of business process model or even other type of model. The approach is embedded in a design science research methodology

Live Query - Visualized Process Analysis

Business process management (BPM) becomes continuously challenging through a steadily increasing number and even more complex processes. For enabling an effective and efficient control of business processes, (semi-)automatic approaches are necessary as a supporting means. However, these approaches are often hardly applicable in practice since they lack a broad applicability or an acceptable ease of use. This work aims to close this gap by providing an approach that supports a widely applicable, (semi-)automatic analysis of business process models and makes the analysis comprehensible using a graphical visualization

Detecting Compliance with Business Rules in Ontology-Based Process Modeling

Extending business processes with semantic annotations has gained recent attention. This comprises relating process elements to ontology elements in order to create a shared conceptual and terminological understanding. In business process modeling, processes may have to adhere to a multitude of rules. A common way to detect compliance automatedly is studying the artifact of the process model itself. However, if an ontology exists as an additional artifact, it may prove beneficial to exploit this structure for compliance detection, as it provides a rich specification of the business process. We therefore propose an approach that models a rules-layer ontop of an ontology. Said rules-layer is implemented by a logic program and can be used to reason about the compliance of an underlying ontology. Our approach allows ad-hoc access to external ontologies, other than similar approaches that are reliant on a redundant logical representation of process model elements

A novel workflow management system for handling dynamic process adaptation and compliance

Modern enterprise organisations rely on dynamic processes. Generally these processes cannot be modelled once and executed repeatedly without change. Enterprise processes may evolve unpredictably according to situations that cannot always be prescribed. However, no mechanism exists to ensure an updated process does not violate any compliance requirements. Typical workflow processes may follow a process definition and execute several thousand instances using a workflow engine without any changes. This is suitable for routine business processes. However, when business processes need flexibility, adaptive features are needed. Updating processes may violate compliance requirements so automatic verification of compliance checking is necessary. The research work presented in this Thesis investigates the problem of current workflow technology in defining, managing and ensuring the specification and execution of business processes that are dynamic in nature, combined with policy standards throughout the process lifycle. The findings from the literature review and the system requirements are used to design the proposed system architecture. Since a two-tier reference process model is not sufficient as a basis for the reference model for an adaptive and compliance workflow management system, a three-tier process model is proposed. The major components of the architecture consist of process models, business rules and plugin modules. This architecture exhibits the concept of user adaptation with structural checks and dynamic adaptation with data-driven checks. A research prototype - Adaptive and Compliance Workflow Management System (ACWfMS) - was developed based on the proposed system architecture to implement core services of the system for testing and evaluation purposes. The ACWfMS enables the development of a workflow management tool to create or update the process models. It automatically validates compliance requirements and, in the case of violations, visual feedback is presented to the user. In addition, the architecture facilitates process migration to manage specific instances with modified definitions. A case study based on the postgraduate research process domain is discussed

Employers’ Strategies Adopting Support for Nigerian Higher Education Institutions Enhancing College Graduates Employability

In Nigeria, employers face the challenge of recruiting and retaining a competent workforce. Most college graduates cannot perform basic office tasks. The problem is that employers in service organizations are failing to adopt strategies to support Nigerian higher education institutions to enhance graduate employability. The purpose of this qualitative single case study was to explore the strategy an employer in a service organization adopts to support Nigerian higher education institutions in enhancing college graduate employability. The stakeholder theory underpinned this study. Five managers and five graduate employees using purposeful sampling were interviewed in a service organization in Lagos, Nigeria. Data were analyzed using pattern-matching logic after triangulation of emerging themes from interviews and triangulating the themes with internal and external organizational artifacts. Research results showed that employers have not supported higher education institutions in enhancing the employability of graduates. A potential positive social change is that the study’s findings could help establish impactful collaboration between higher education institutions and employers in the service sector to boost graduate employability and minimize college graduate unemployment

Corporate Governance Implementation in the Nigerian Banking Industry

The increasing level of fraud, the collapse of banks, and the loss of confidence in the Nigerian banking industry have been attributed to poor corporate governance. The problem of this study was effective implementation of corporate governance in Nigeria where multiple regulations are in place. The purpose of this qualitative single case study was to understand how corporate governance is implemented in the Nigerian banking industry in the face of a multiplicity of regulations. The research question investigated how Nigerian bank managers implement corporate governance regulations in the face of a multiplicity of regulations. The conceptual framework was grounded in stewardship theory. Data collection included document analysis and face-to-face semistructured interviews to gain an understanding of how to implement corporate governance based on the perception of 15 purposefully selected senior managers and directors of the host bank. Data were analyzed using Yin\u27s 5-Stage data analysis approach. Findings revealed that the involvement of senior bank managers and the adoption of global best practices, training, education, and awareness creation are the prerequisites for effective implementation of corporate governance. Findings may be used to reduce corporate failure, improve compliance, and restore confidence in the banking industry through enhancing the understanding of practitioners, investors, and policymakers on how to implement corporate governance in a highly regulated banking environment and contribute to positive social change

Semantic Business Process Modeling

This book presents a process-oriented business modeling framework based on semantic technologies. The framework consists of modeling languages, methods, and tools that allow for semantic modeling of business motivation, business policies and rules, and business processes. Quality of the proposed modeling framework is evaluated based on the modeling content of SAP Solution Composer and several real-world business scenarios

Using social media to inform supplier selection in new product introduction

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel UniversitySupplier networks today are seeing a complete redirection in their purpose from a decade ago. Supplier networks focused originally on transaction-oriented exchanges for sending purchase orders electronically. However, based on the current increased need to understand business risks, supplier networks are demonstrating a clear shift in emphasis from establishing “transaction-based focus” relationships towards the evolution of network platforms. The Aberdeen Group (2011) demonstrates that 76 per cent of supplier networks increasingly are being used to identify new suppliers and market opportunities. Moreover, with social-networking features similar to Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook (which are very recent phenomena), supplier networks have become more important in their role of spending management based on the ability to help organisations identify new suppliers while sharing information with other buyer organizations. Therefore, analysing data from supplier networks today has become a necessary strategy for optimizing transaction-focused procurement, in addition to improving supplier relationships. With this in mind, the Social Media Domain Analysis (SoMeDoA) framework has been developed to facilitate the decision-making process for selecting flexible suppliers within the e-procurement-based marketplace and apply it to a real set of data gathered from two social-networking sites (Twitter and LinkedIn). The research contributes a rigorous method that analyses effectively domain concepts and relations between notions from social networks and builds the domain ontology. The effectiveness of the framework, in analysing domain and relations, is evaluated by its application to varying datasets gathered from social networks, including the pharmaceutical domain. This model extrapolates findings from stages in the research and marries elements from various papers and frameworks therein, in order to produce a guideline model for organisations seeking a suitable supplier with whom to work. The results of the evaluation are encouraging, and provide concrete outcomes in an area that is little researched.MATCH programme (UK engineering and physical sciences research council grants numbers GR/S29874/01, EP/F063822/1 and EP/G012393/1)