Change and Compliance in Collaborative Processes

During their lifecycle, business processes are keen to change. Changes either concern the process model structure or the accompanying rules; e.g. compliance rules (laws and regulations). In the context of business process collaborations, several process partners collaborate together, and changing one process might result in knock-on effects on the other processes; i.e., change propagation. Since business processes are often subject to restrictions that stem from laws, regulations or guidelines; i.e., compliance rules, changing them might lead to the violations of these rules (non-compliability). So far, only the impacts of process changes in choreographies have been studied. In this work, we propose an approach that analyzes and evaluates the impacts of process changes on the different compliance rules and inversely, the impacts of compliance rule changes on the process choreography

Supporting compliance verification for collaborative business processes.

Collaborative business processes are the current trend of business processes supported by the advances in technology like the Internet and collaborative networks. Enterprises no longer do business in isolation. The customer demands are always changing and becoming sophisticated with dynamic requirements and the shortening period in which they must be met. Collaborative business processes must conform with not only customer demands but also with laws, standards, best practice and regulations. These impose constraints on the business process that must be satisfied otherwise they attract criminal charges or financial fines. Corporate scandals for companies like Enron, World- com, Societe General etc. were a result of non-compliance. This attracted regulations like the Sarbanese Oxley Act, Basel III, Anti money laundering act among others with articles guiding operational practice. However, non compliance is still observed especially among SMEs that do not possess the skilled man power or the funding to acquire automated compliance solutions. In this thesis, we sought to support non-expert end users through a compliance management approach that can guide the specification and verification of compliance for collaborative business process with a range of policy and regulatory requirements. Collaborative business processes differ from traditional business processes. They are characterised by specific attributes that present unique verification requirements that cannot be automatically addressed by existing verification approaches. To achieve the intended goal, design science research method was employed to develop a mechanism to elicit requirements from different sources, translate them into formal constraints based on formal semantics, and a set of algorithms were composed to support compliance verification. The algorithms provide meaningful and easy to understand feedback to the end user about the compliance or violation of the collaborative business process. Due to the fact that policies and regulations change often, we adopted simulation analysis as a technique to assess and analyse the impact of such changes to the business process before actual implementation. The thesis artifacts are evaluated based on known information systems model evaluation methods following the design science recommended steps and the Method Evaluation model (MEM). We also validate and evaluate the compliance algorithms using a different industrial use case (the car insurance trading business process) from the case used in their design (the pick and pack business process). Further more, the performance of the algorithms is evaluated based on their computation complexity

Supporting Workflow Schema Evolution By Efficient Compliance Checks

Process-oriented support of collaborative work is an important challenge today. At first glance, Workflow Management Systems (WfMS) seem to be very suitable tools for realizing team-work processes. However, such processes have to be frequently adapted, e.g., due to process optimizations or when process goals change. Unfortunately, runtime adaptability still seems to be an unsolvable problem for almost all existing WfMS. Usually, process changes can be accomplished by modifying a corresponding (graphical) workflow (WF) schema. Especially for long-running processes, however, it is extremely important that such changes can be propagated to already running WF instances as well, but without causing inconsistencies and errors. In addition, team work often requires ad-hoc process modifications, i.e., individual changes of single WF instances. The paper presents a general and comprehensive correctness criterion for ensuring compliance of in-progress WF instances with a modified WF schema. For different kinds of WF schema changes, it is precisely stated, which rules and which information are needed at mininum for satisfying this criterion

Verification and Compliance in Collaborative Processes

Evidently, COVID-19 has changed our lives and is likely to make a lasting impact on our economic development and our industry and services. With the ongoing process of digital transformation in industry and services, Collaborative Networks (CNs) is required to be more efficient, productive, flexible, resilient and sustainable according to change of situations and related rules applied afterwards. Although the CN area is relatively young, it requires the previous research to be extended, i.e. business process management from dealing with processes within a single organization into processes across different organizations. In this paper, we review current business process verification and compliance research. Different tools approaches and limitations of them are compared. The further research issues and potential solutions of business process verification and compliance check are discussed in the context of CNs

Determination and evaluation of web accessibility

The Web is the most pervasive collaborative technology in widespread use today; however, access to the web and its many applications cannot be taken for granted. Web accessibility encompasses a variety of concerns ranging from societal, political, and economic to individual, physical, and intellectual through to the purely technical. Thus, there are many perspectives from which web accessibility can be understood and evaluated. In order to discuss these concerns and to gain a better understanding of web accessibility, an accessibility framework is proposed using as its base a layered evaluation framework from Computer Supported Co-operative Work research and the ISO standard, ISO/IEC 9126 on software quality. The former is employed in recognition of the collaborative nature of the web and its importance in facilitating communication. The latter is employed to refine and extend the technical issues and to highlight the need for considering accessibility from the viewpoint of the web developer and maintainer as well as the web user. A technically inaccessible web is unlikely to be evolved over time. A final goal of the accessibility framework is to provide web developers and maintainers with a practical basis for considering web accessibility through the development of a set of accessibility factors associated with each identified layer