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Advancing the Concepts & Practices of Information Resources Management in Modern Organizations

Managing Process Compliance with Standards

Managing Process Compliance with Standards
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Author(s): Larry Y. C. Cheung (Loughborough University, England), Paul W. H. Chung (Loughborough University, England)and Ray J. Dawson (Loughborough University, England)
Copyright: 2002
Pages: 5
Source title: Issues & Trends of Information Technology Management in Contemporary Organizations
Source Editor(s): Mehdi Khosrow-Pour, D.B.A. (Information Resources Management Association, USA)
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-930708-39-6.ch035
ISBN13: 9781930708396
EISBN13: 9781466641358

Abstract

The current best practice of providing reliable systems is to embody the development process in recent industry safety standards and guidelines, such as IEC 61508. These standards generally define practices in terms of constraints. The degree of standards compliance can be established by checking the execution of essential activities against these constraints. However, every application is different because of the differences in project details. The lack of the ability to ensure that a process is planned and performed complying with a standard necessitates the improvements in the current workflow management systems (WfMS). Our Compliance Flow research project aims to provide support for handling complex, ad-hoc, dynamic changing, and collaborative engineering design process. This paper describes the use of an intelligent compliance agent, called Inspector, in Compliance Flow to ensure a standard complied process. The standards that the design process intended to be complied with are modelled into a model of standards using the Standard Modelling Language (SML) we developed. The Inspector performs a number of matching processes between the model of standards and the development process to achieve the compliance. Some examples drawing on IEC 61508 are used to illustrate the mechanism of modelling and compliance checks.

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