Towards Open Exchange of Procedural Controls Among Institutions

This paper presents an automated technique for transforming business procedures, adding, replacing or removing procedural controls. This technique may also serve as a basis for sharing best practice auditing and control procedures among institutions. Stated more bluntly, the problem we consider is bureaucracies, and what a pain they are. Yet all bureaucracies are not created equal – some are less painful than others, even though they seem to do as good a job or even better. Why isn’t best practice shared? Well, clearly competing enterprises do not like to give away their tricks. On the other hand, there are many non-competing institutions, such as libraries, customs agencies, and even universities. Why don’t they learn best practice procedures from one another? To some extent they do – but it tends to be at the level of sharing high level ideas, rather than sharing detailed blueprints or detailed specifications. We propose not only the sharing of specifications, but the sharing of actual implemented components, that can be modified as needed to fit specific contexts. By institutions we include government agencies such as customs, police, educational institutions, etc. that have operational functions in common. Typically, private organizations are less open to sharing procedural control solutions, because of competitive pressures. However, in cases where governmental regulation is imposed on the entire industry (e.g. SOX), there may be more incentive to share solutions. Indeed, novel control solutions may suggest a new business models and entreprenurial opportunities.