There are a raft of regulations and contractual requirements worldwide. From the European 8th Directive, through Sarbanes Oxley, the companies bill, freedom of information act, Data protection, HIPAA, PCI/DSS.

These differ in structure and impact but a common thread is that they require mandated use of information and that businesses understand, manage and control their processes closely enough to assure that mandate.

These legislations or contracts require certain elements of infrastructure, monitoring, logs, reports and evidence are in place - and that is compliance. The business must be documented with auditable processes and procedures from the top to the bottom.

Organisations do not have much of a choice regarding compliance and while requirements have often been short term and requiring specific domain knowledge of the legislation, businesses are looking to automate complaince within the tight process control and managent offered by Business Process Management (BPM).