Detecting the Effects of Changes on the Compliance of Cross-organizational Business Processes

An emerging challenge for collaborating business partners is to properly de?ne and evolve their cross-organizational processes with respect to imposed global compliance rules. Since compliance veri?ca- tion is known to be very costly, reducing the number of compliance rules to be rechecked in the context of process changes seems to be promising. Opposed to intra-organizational processes, however, change e?ects can- not be easily assessed in such distributed scenarios, where partners only provide restricted public views and assertions on their private processes. Even if local process changes are invisible to partners, they might a?ect the compliance of the cross-organizational process with the mentioned rules. This paper provides an approach for ensuring compliance when evolving a cross-organizational process. For this purpose, we construct quali?ed dependency graphs expressing relationships between process ac- tivities, process assertions, and compliance rules. Based on such graphs, we are able to determine the subset of compliance rules that may be a?ected by a particular change. Altogether, our approach increases the e?ciency of compliance checking in cross-organizational settings.