Satisfaction of control objectives by control processes

Showing that business processes comply with regulatory requirements is not easy. We investigate this compliance problem in the case that the requirements are expressed as a directed, acyclic graph, with high-level requirements (called control objectives) at the top and with low-level requirements (called control activities) at the bottom. These control activities are then implemented by control processes. We introduce two algorithms: the first identifies whether a given set of control activities is sufficient to satisfy the top-level control objectives; the second identifies those steps of control processes that contribute to the satisfaction of top-level control objectives. We illustrate these concepts and the algorithms by examples taken from a large healthcare provider. © 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.