Open Access

Jörg Becker, Patrick Delfmann, Hanns-Alexander Dietrich, Matthias Steinhorst, Mathias Eggert

• Given the strong increase in regulatory requirements for business processes the management of business process compliance becomes a more and more regarded field in IS research. Several methods have been developed to support compliance checking of conceptual models. However, their focus on distinct modeling languages and mostly linear (i.e., predecessor-successor related) compliance rules may hinder widespread adoption and application in practice. Furthermore, hardly any of them has been evaluated in a real-world setting. We address this issue by applying a generic pattern matching approach for conceptual models to business process compliance checking in the financial sector. It consists of a model query language, a search algorithm and a corresponding modelling tool prototype. It is (1) applicable for all graph-based conceptual modeling languages and (2) for different kinds of compliance rules. Furthermore, based on an applicability check, we (3) evaluate the approach in a financial industry project setting against its relevance for decision support of audit and compliance management tasks.