Unibright Diaries — Blockchains for Business Process Management

Business process management (BPM) is concerned with the design, execution, monitoring, and improvement of business processes. Systems that support the validation and execution of processes have been used by companies to streamline and automate intra-organisational processes. Blockchain technology has the potential to change the environment in which inter-organisational processes are able to operate. Blockchains offer a way to execute processes in a trustworthy matter even in a network where there is no mutual trust between different nodes.

Currently, there are several blockchains which have been adopted in various domains in order to facilitate the operation of new business processes. For example, application scenarios in the financial sector, logistics and supply chain processes, music distribution, and authenticity of items.

A proposed use of blockchains in inter-organisational processes can be described as: large parts of the control flow and business logic of inter-organisational business processes can be compiled from process models into smart contracts which ensure the join process is correctly executed. Typical barriers that complicate the deployment of inter-organisational processes can be removed, if execution of such processes is done by using smart contracts on blockchains.

• The blockchain can act as an immutable public ledger, so that participants can review a trustworthy history of messages to pinpoint the source of an error.
• Smart contracts can offer independent process monitoring from a global viewpoint, such that only expected messages are accepted, and only if they are sent from the person registered for the respective role in the process instance.
• Encryption can ensure that only the data that must be visible is public, while the remaining data is only readable for the process participants that require it.

These capabilities demonstrate how blockchain technology can help organisations to implement and execute business processes across organisational boundaries even if they cannot agree on a trusted third-party or simply they cannot find one. The core aspect of the technology enables support of enterprise collaborations going far beyond asset management, including the management of entire supply chains, sharing personal records in privacy, or tracking sensitive items from source to consumption increasing safety.

Using the traditional business process management lifecycle as a framework of reference, the implementation of blockchains can provide incremental changes in the respective areas:

• Identification: Process identification is concerned with the description and evaluation of a company from a process-oriented perspective, thus connecting strategic alignment with process improvement.
• Discovery: Process discovery refers to the collection of information about the current way processes operate and their representation as a process model.
• Analysis: Process analysis refers to obtaining insights into issues related to the way a business process currently operates.
• Redesign: Process redesign deals with the systematic improvement of a process.
• Implementation: Process implementation refers to the procedure of transforming a to-be model into software components executing the business process.
• Execution: Execution refers to the initiation of individual cases and their information processing.
• Monitoring: Process monitoring refers to collecting events of process executions, displaying them in an comprehensive way, and triggering alerts in case where undesired behaviour is observed.
• Adaptation and Evolution: Runtime adaptation refers to the notion of changing the process during execution. This can for instance be achieved by allowing participants in a process to change the model during its execution.

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