Authors: Lior Limonad, Yair Wand
Tags: 2008, business process modeling, conceptual modeling, control systems, ontological foundations of systems analysis and design
As the result of several large scale fraud incidents, new regulations such as the Sarbanes-Oxley act [1] in the US have been enacted to improve monitoring activities of public companies and transparency to stakeholders. These new regulations propagate into most of business activities including accounting and financial activities, manufacturing, and logistics. Consequently, they have significant implications to information systems.
The new control requirements lead to a dual challenge. First, organizations usually do not have pre-defined conceptualization and techniques or an overall methodology for introducing business process controls. Second, substantial resources might be needed to analyze and adjust existing processes and controls for compliance with the new regulations.
In general, introducing controls as an inherent component of business process architecture would be a valuable and perhaps an inevitable goal for companies.
Since controls involve regulating and monitoring, we suggest to use the Generic Process Model (GPM) as a theoretical foundation to introduce controls in business process models. However, GPM has not been formed with an explicit notion of controls. In this work we suggest an overall framework to extend the GPM to include controls as part of process models. The first part of the work presents the theoretical foundation for introducing controls into a business process model. The second part extends this theoretical framework with the notion of controls and proposes a procedure for automating the insertion of controls into process models. The third part suggests an enforcement schema of control through a third party representing an independent auditing authority. The work concludes with model assessment and future work.
Cite as:
Limonad L., Wand Y. (2008). “Extending Business Process Models with Controls,” in AIS SIGSAND, Provo, Utah, United States, May 23-24, 2008.
