Governance & compliance

Governance has become a huge topic in the business world. Key drivers are increasing regulatory pressure, needs for better risk management, and a purely economic desire of enterprises to monitor and influence their business performance faster. As governance may touch almost all parts of an enterprise, it is a complex issue that benefits from a carefully planned framework. We support IBM in developing a Unified Governance Framework (UGF) intended to cover the entire space of enterprise governance, with a focus on the role of IT-related services and components therein.

The underlying regulatory pressure is an answer to the high-profile incidents of corporate accounting fraud, security violations, terrorist acts, and disruptions of major financial markets that we have seen in recent years. This has led to a proliferation of new regulations that directly impact businesses. As a result, businesses — in particular publicly traded companies — face the daunting task of complying with an increasing number of intricate and constantly evolving regulations. Together with the growing complexity of today's enterprises, this requires a holistic compliance management approach with the goal of continually increasing automation.

The specific research topic we have introduced is called REALM (regulations expressed as logical models). It is a metamodel and method for modeling regulations and managing them in a systematic lifecycle in an enterprise. We formalize regulatory requirements as sets of compliance rules in a novel real-time temporal object logic over concept models in UML2.0, together with metadata for traceability. REALM provides the basis for subsequent model transformations, deployment, and continuous monitoring and enforcement of compliance in real business processes and IT systems.