Eros: an approach for ensuring regulatory compliance of process outcomes

In the service industry, such as healthcare, catering, tourism, and others, there exist regulations that require organisations to provide service outcomes that comply with the regulations. More and more regulations in the service sector are, or are aimed to be, outcome-focused regulations. An outcome prescribed in the regulation is what users should experience or achieve when the regulated business processes are compliant. Service providers need to proactively ensure that the outcomes specified in the regulations have been achieved prior to conducting the relevant part of the business or prior to inspectors discovering noncompliance. Published approaches check requirements or business processes, not outcomes, against regulations and thus this still leaves uncertain as to whether what the users actually experience is what is prescribed in the regulations. In this research preview paper., we propose a method for assessing the compliance of process outcomes. Actual outcomes from business processes are checked against prescribed outcomes from the regulations. The method is illustrated by an example from the U.K.'s CQC regulations in the care-home environment. The key contribution of this paper is a preliminary approach for proactively checking the compliance of process outcomes.