A Framework for Seamless and Compliant Service Consumption in Outsourcing Scenarios

The ability to support the outsourcing of parts of a business process has become a major requirement within enterprise information systems (EIS). If, however, certain procedural or technical constraints derived from compliance regulations have been specified on parts of such a process we face the problem of maintaining such constraints in outsourcing scenarios as well. In this paper we describe a technique and architectural support for flexible outsourcing of process steps at runtime, at the same time supporting the service provider in delivering the required evidence regarding his compliant handling of the outsourced artefacts. We demonstrate the augmentation of business processes with compliance constraints for later model-driven and automated generation of security and configuration policies. An architecture is then presented detailing the working of a compliance-centric service gateway, supporting the outsourcing of constrained activities irrespective of the service provider’s EIS landscape.