Here’s an intersting article on compliance and process management–looking outside ITSM for ideas. Do you see a high level parallel?– ERP and BPM equalling a closed loop process–in much the same way as ITIL’s CMDB and change management form a closed loop process.

“Compliance is a huge topic everywhere,” says Dr. Mathias Kirchmer, CEO of IDS Scheer for the Americas and Japan. It’s a huge topic at ProcessWorld, too, just as at previous years. That said, this iteration of the annual IDS Scheer event looks forward to a world of process management that subsumes compliance, not the other way around.

Here’s another way to look at it. Enterprise resource planning (ERP) plus business process management (BPM) equals an integrated people-process-compliance loop. Dr. Kirchmer offers an example from an organizational perspective. “The procurement clerk executes the job using an ERP system, while the manager organizes the process work and integrate it into the overall organization.”

There are two layers here: business activities enabled by operational systems, and the organization and reporting of such activities via a superimposed BPM solution. If you adopt these layers in concert, you have a framework that can be applied specifically to compliance but to risk management in general. “Siemens started with global BPM,” says Dr. Kirchmer of an IDS Scheer customer, “but used our ARIS Audit Manager to also handle a global compliance and global SOX [Sarbanes-Oxley] approach.”

When you stop thinking of compliance as a one-off headache but rather as a practice anchored in a specific process-oriented approach to business, you can get more mileage out of your investments as well as derive certain benefits (such as streamlined workflow).

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