Meeting the Challenges of Collaborative Network Compliance – an exemplary view.

Abstract

Ensuring the conformance of an organization’s processes to certain rules and regulations has become a major issue in today’s business world. As non-compliance with these regulations could cost organizations a considerable sum of money in fines or litigation or even loss of company reputation.  Recently, the intelligent connectivity of collaborative networks of people, organization, machines, and smart things has become a high potential for value creation, and at the same time bring about some compliance challenges. Ensuring compliance in such a collaborative network environment (i.e., a dynamic and networked environment) is complicated due to its design principle for decentralized decision-making. To meet up with the various challenges of collaborative networks, this paper reviews an existing compliance approach, i.e., eCRG’s (extended Compliance Rule Graph) specification language and its decomposition approach.  A real-world collaborative case is used to examine which compliance properties can be checked by the existing approaches and which compliance properties cannot be checked yet.  We further explore how to extend the approach to meet up with the identified challenges of collaborative network compliance, which are served as a base for supporting the automated compliance checking of Collaborative Process either at design time or run-time.