Towards Speech Act Based Compliance
Todays organizations are socio technical entities, and interactions have significant impact on their success. Around 50% of the work in the US is knowledge work, and other countries show a similar tendency. Compliance monitoring of course can only cover processes and tasks that are modeled or documented somehow. Therefore, today it faces the problem that half of the workforce performing ad hoc interactions and tasks cannot be supported properly. This paper introduces speech act based business rules that focus on the pragmatic intention of interactions instead of events and artifacts. No process schema is necessary. The rules can be applied on annotated tasks or artifacts in BPMSs as well as documented ad hoc interactions. The approach requires some mapping of interaction artifacts to speech acts, and except for cross cutting concerns a common process or case identifier to formulate rules on associated artifacts. Speech act based inference relying on Searle's F(P) framework enables for example finding commitments including unfulfilled promises, pending interactions, and patterns of interaction. The introduction of Speech Act Theory into compliance monitoring can facilitate the integration of structured, semi structured and ad hoc processes. Integrating Speech Act Theory into common approaches to compliance monitoring is examined: LTL and CTL rules, Rete based business rule management systems represented by JBoss Drools, and complex event processing. Rules are not restricted to validate compliance, they also emit tasks, recommendations, and warnings to translate legal requirements and corporate objectives into daily business.
2016 IEEE 18th Conference on Business Informatics (CBI)