Addressing the Contemporary Challenges of Business Process Compliance

Abstract The aim of business process compliance (BPC) is to ensure that business processes are executed in accordance with a prescribed set of rules. In practice, the evidence would suggest that achieving this goal is challenging. Penalties and subsequent remediation costs in the Australian banking industry amounted to over A$10bn between 2017 and 2022. The research community has identified many challenges, but the industry perspective is typically missing from that research. The study takes advantage of recent events in the Australian banking industry that saw detailed regulatory reports made public, highlighting the challenges the industry faces trying to maintain compliance. The study supplements these reports with BPC-related insights from practitioners and consultancy groups to develop an industry perspective on the challenges. Consolidating the two perspectives presents a comprehensive view of BPC’s challenges and the differing emphasis that each stakeholder group places on the challenges. Process mining may provide a pathway to reconciling these different perspectives. Both the BPC literature and industry have promoted process mining’s potential to address the challenges. To explore this proposition, the study details the features of representative commercial process mining software and then maps these features to the challenges. The resultant conceptual map is used to analyze known and novel BPC challenges. It outlines the limitations that must be addressed, from both a research and industry perspective, to maintain and improve compliance.