On the Design of Compliance Governance Dashboards for Effective Compliance and Audit Management

Assessing whether a company’s business practices conform to laws and regulations and follow standards and best practices, i.e., compliance governance, is a complex and costly task. Few software tools aiding compliance governance exist; however, they typically do not really address the needs of who is actually in charge of assessing and controlling compliance, that is, compliance experts and auditors. We advocate the use of compliance governance dashboards, whose design and implementation is however challenging for at least three reasons: (i) it is fundamental to identify the right level of abstraction for the information to be shown; (ii) it is not trivial to visualize different analysis perspectives; and (iii) it is difficult to manage the large amount of involved concepts, instruments, and data. This paper shows how to address these issues, which concepts and models underlie the problem, and, eventually, how IT can effectively support compliance analysis in Service-Oriented Architectures.