Compliance Evaluation Featuring Heat Maps (CE-HM): A Meta-Modeling-Based Approach

The recent global economic crisis and the growing reliance on information technology pile pressure on organizations to comply with regulations, legal rules and laws. Organizations tend to struggle with paper work for the mere purpose of proving compliance. Compliance Management should be subject to existing management frameworks. Otherwise, ineffective procedures will evolve, and the organization will fail to combine Compliance Management with continuous improvement measures. We advocate for a generic compliance evaluation method, which builds upon existing enterprise modeling frameworks, for three reasons: First, synergies in data acquisition will arise. Second, reusing organization-wide accepted viewpoints will create trust among stakeholders and ease communication of the compliance status. Third, taking steps to improve compliance will be part of daily operations based on institutionalized processes geared to the established management frameworks. In addition, the prototypical implementation of the ‘Compliance Evaluation Featuring Heat Maps (CE-HM)’ method based on a meta-modeling platform is presented.