Business process and business rule modeling languages for compliance management: A representational analysis

Organizations are under increasing scrutiny to document their compliance to regulatory requirements. To this end, they have to formally document their operating procedures to support their compliance management efforts. Both process modeling languages and rule modeling languages are candidates for the documentation of organizational policies and procedures. While both types of languages are currently used to document organizational practices, little work has been done to understand their synergies and overlap. Accordingly, in this paper we use the Bunge-Wand-Weber (BWW) representation theory as a basis for such an analysis. We perform a representational analysis of two popular rule modeling languages, viz.,SRML and SBVR. We compare their representation capabilities with those of four popular conceptual business process modeling languages, and focus on the aspects of maximum ontological completeness and minimum ontological overlap. The outcome of this study shows that a combination of two languages, viz. SRML and BPMN, is more suitable for documenting compliance than any single modeling language, and that the combination of process and rule modeling languages shows synergies.