Flexible Workflows and Compliance: A Solvable Contradiction?!

Stefan Sackmann () and Kai Kittel ()
Additional contact information
Stefan Sackmann: Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg
Kai Kittel: Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg

A chapter in BPM - Driving Innovation in a Digital World, 2015, pp 247-258 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract Managing workflows is increasingly becoming flexible on both the conceptual and technical level. Reacting directly to new context situations and adapting workflows to changing requests both rapidly and flexibly are seen as key characteristic for future agile companies. Providing flexibility in process execution for single workflow instances is also a promising basis for expanding the scope of Business Process Management to other application fields and for integrating so-called dark processes into the system. However, workflows are not only subject to “pure” business needs but also increasingly to compliance requirements. To validate that a workflow is compliant with relevant laws and regulations, in principal, each change of a workflow has also to be checked according to its consequences for compliance. Not surprisingly, validating compliance is currently a well-known challenge for many companies, specifically their IT governance, and is, usually, a time-consuming manual task dealing with the challenge of fast adaptations and changes. Management has to balance the trade-off between flexible but (possibly) non-compliant workflows and compliant but (mostly) inflexible workflows. Addressing this trade-off, we present a novel approach called FlexCom and its prototypical implementation in this contribution. It aims at solving the trade-off by allowing a person in charge to change a workflow, even during execution, according to business needs, and by automatically integrating required control processes for achieving the correspondent compliance requirements. It is demonstrated that with such “sticky” controls at hand, the balance between flexibility of processes and compliance can be managed in a novel and promising way.

Date: 2015
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:mgmchp:978-3-319-14430-6_16

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9783319144306

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-14430-6_16

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Management for Professionals from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().