Silver Bullet for all Trust Issues? How Blockchain Really Helps Businesses Collaborate

Blockchain is a new technology that helps in situations where different businesses and organizations have to work together. We call this a collaborative business process. It is characteristic for such processes that

• all organizations work independently,
• organizations have small, well-defined points of interaction, and
• the overall process must work well to achieve the final goal.

Let’s take a current example in supply chain management. Think about how vaccines are getting from a sender to a receiver in international delivery. The sender is the vaccine manufacturer in Germany, and the receiver is a vaccination center in the Netherlands.

The sender packs the parcel and puts a tag on it. The sender also defines that this parcel must never get warmer than 8°C. This is a service level agreement towards to carrier. The sender gives the parcel to Deutsche Post (the German state-owned post office) in the first step. Deutsche Post takes the parcel into a truck and drives it to the airport. The temperature is controlled with a cooling unit in the truck. Deutsche Post hands over the parcel to DHL since they are operating outside of Germany. DHL flies the parcel to Amsterdam, where they give it to Post NL. Post NL drives the vaccine package to the vaccination center.

This process is a good example of a collaborative business process: Different organizations (sender, receiver, and the three carriers) have to work together to get the vaccine to its destination. They have small, well-defined interactions points (the handovers), and if some part fails, the whole process fails.

In such collaborative processes, there is a lot of uncertainty. For example:

• Will the parcel with vaccines be there on time?
• Will all carriers keep the parcel cooled?
• Are the service level agreements defined correctly?
• When the parcel gets too warm, will it be possible to deny that this happened?

Whenever there is uncertainty in a process, there is a need for trust.

And now: Blockchain.

There is generally no consensus on what blockchain does “with trust”. Some call the technology trust-less, trust-enhancing, or trust-replacing.

The method you will learn when you follow this series defines blockchain as a technology that can mitigate trust issues. I developed a framework to describe and classify how applying the technology can mitigate different types of trust issues. We call these ways blockchain-based trust patterns.

In the next part of this series, we will look into blockchain-based trust patterns and what they do in a process.

Next part of the series: 3 Key Aspects to Consider When Analyzing Trust in Business Collaborations

About this series: This series is based on the scientific paper

Müller, Marcel, Nadine Ostern, and Michael Rosemann. “Silver bullet for all trust issues? Blockchain-based trust patterns for collaborative business processes.” International Conference on Business Process Management. Springer, Cham, 2020. Download it for free here.

About the author: Marcel Müller is a German deep tech entrepreneur and researcher with a passion for bringing innovations from research to the market. He is the CEO of JadenX, a company that develops deep tech innovations together with partners. Marcel is also the founder of KnowledgeX, a paradigm-changing data science marketplace that uses blockchain and trusted execution environments for trusted collaboration. Furthermore, Marcel is a researcher at SNET at TU Berlin.