Business Process Management: Blockchain and Central and Eastern Europe Forum

In recent years, distributed ledger technologies like blockchains have gained much popularity both within industry and research. Today, blockchains do not only act as the underlying technology for cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, but have also been identified as a potentially disruptive technology in many different fields, e.g., supply chain tracking and healthcare. The widespread attention for blockchains has led to manifold research and development activities. As a result, today’s blockchain landscape is heavily fragmented, with different, incompatible technologies being available to potential users. Since interoperability between different blockchains is usually not foreseen in existing protocols and standards, functionalities like sending tokens from one participant to another, or invoking and executing smart contracts can only be carried out within a single blockchain.

In this paper, we discuss the need for blockchain interoperability and how it could help to stimulate a paradigm shift from today’s closed blockchains to an open system where devices and users can interact with each other across the boundaries of blockchains. For this, we consider the areas of cross-blockchain token transfers, as well as cross-blockchain smart contract invocation and interaction.

Blockchain-based applications are arising because they ensure integrity, anti-tampering, and traceability. The data tampering risk is one of the main security concerns of data-centric applications. By the nature of the blockchain technology, it is befitting a revolutionary solution to mitigate the tampering risk. But there exists no proper guidance to explain how blockchain-based application could mitigate this risk. In this paper, we consider tampering risk management and discuss how blockchain-based applications could mitigate it. The study includes a comparison of different solutions.

This paper proposes a design for privacy-critical blockchain applications with a focus on license trading: Observing parties shall neither know about the licenses nor the identity of the parties involved. On the other hand trading partners, themselves shall only get the information disclosed after the deal is completed. The proposed platform-concept enables trading intellectual property licenses while simultaneously decreasing transaction costs. The manuscript contains a concept analysis regarding privacy and security issues.

There are currently different views in the scientific community on how the distributed ledger technology (DLT) relates to the blockchain technology. Some view them as synonyms, whereas others view DLT as the umbrella term for all blockchain related technologies. This paper approaches this topic by deriving definitions and core characteristics of DLT and blockchain technology. By using these definitions and an additional market research, a categorization for DLT and blockchain can be created. This categorization will operate as an additional component for IT-architects to decide on appropriate DLT solutions for their specific distributed ledger use cases.

Multi-party business processes are characterized by the lack of a central coordination, as each participant controls only a portion of the process. Nonetheless, organizations often need to know how the whole process is performed, especially when artifacts belonging to an organization are manipulated by the other participants. This requires a monitoring system able to collect and share in a trusted way data about the status of the activities performed by the different parties. To achieve this goal, in this paper we combine artifact-driven monitoring with blockchain. The former, introduced in previous work, can determine how the process is executed, while the latter enables a trusted data exchange among the participants of the business process to reduce the possibility for a fraudulent organization to alter monitoring data. The feasibility and the impacts on costs of the proposed platform is validated via a prototype based on the Ethereum blockchain implementing a real-world use case.

Blockchain technology has been gaining popularity as a platform for developing decentralized applications and executing cross-organisational processes. However, extracting data that allows analysing the process view from blockchains is surprisingly hard. Therefore, blockchain data are rarely used for process mining. In this paper, we propose a framework for alleviating that pain. The framework comprises three main parts: a manifest specifying how data is logged, an extractor for retrieving data (structured according to the XES standard), and a generator that produces logging code to support smart contract developers. Among others, we propose a convenient way to encode logging data in a compact form, to achieve relatively low cost and high throughput for on-chain logging. The proposal is evaluated with logs created from generated logging code, as well as with existing blockchain applications that do not make use of the proposed code generator.

Blockchains are a promising enabling technology for inter-organizational processes in untrusted environments and for the implementation of smart contracts in general. Smart contracts aim at three major objectives: observability, online enforceability and privity. Privity strives for limiting the sharing of information within a contract to those parties of a contract who have a contractual need to know. However, current BPM-based systems operating on blockchains do not address privity. The approaches deal with enforceability and privity as mutual exclusive properties. We show that the trade-offs between privity and enforceability can be considered in fine details and propose means to balance privity and enforceability in the design of smart contracts according to the application requirements. Besides this conceptual basis, we introduce patterns for encryption and key exchange allowing different levels of privity and for supporting proactive online enforceability in the presence of encrypted on-chain data.

Smart contracts provide promising use cases for the public and the private sector by combining cryptographically secure blockchains and the versatility of software. In contrast to public blockchains, private ones can be tailored by configuring blockchain-specific parameters like the time passing between two consecutive blocks, the size of blocks, the hardware of the nodes running the blockchain software, or simply the size of the network. However, the effects of parameters on the performance of private smart contract platforms are not well studied.

In this work, we systematically examine to which extent the performance of private Ethereum blockchains scales with various parameters, and which parameters constitute bottlenecks. We introduce a concept for measuring the performance and scalability of private Ethereum smart contract platforms, as well as a framework for the automatic deployment of differently configured private Ethereum blockchains on the cloud. Based on the collected performance-related data, we visualize the impact of parameter changes on performance. Our results show that the effect of variations in one parameter is highly dependent on the configuration of other parameters, especially when running the system near its limits. Moreover, we identify a structure for the bottlenecks of current private Ethereum smart contract platforms.

Decisions are an important aspect of enterprise operations. Decisions cross the boundary of a single enterprise, if multiple business partners collaborate in the decision making. To ascertain that all the participants behave as expected, blockchains can support collaborative decision making by storing relevant data and executing crucial decision logic in a tamper-proof and transparent manner. However, current blockchain technologies require the participants to publish the decision logic and are, therefore, not suited for sensitive data. This paper addresses this issue by proposing an approach that does not need to reveal sensitive data for supporting decision making. However, in case of a conflict, any participant can call for a blockchain-based conflict resolution at the cost of revealing the decision. To counter false claims that purposely reveal the decision, we provide a blockchain-enforced mechanism that discourages malicious behavior. We implement the approach using the Ethereum blockchain and evaluate the costs of resolving conflicts on a large set of decision models.

Considering the inefficiency and ineffectiveness of the current manual land registration systems being practiced in Sri Lanka and the emergence of the concept of blockchain based land registries as a successful replacement for badly kept, mismanaged and/or corrupt land registries from around the world, this research proposes and evaluates the applicability of a permissioned distributed land ledger solution for Sri Lanka. The final solution presents optimal content for the ledger (extracted from the current folio), preserves current land transactions, has reassigned duties to state validators and has got away with the folio system while ensuring derivation of the pedigree/folio tree for a land at a given time. A regional distributed land ledger representing the present regional ledger system and an island wide unified land ledger which addresses unequal regional land transaction density conditions across the island were proposed as solution models. The proposed models of the solution were implemented using Hyperledger Fabric v1.2. They were evaluated for performance on an AWS t2.large instance with 2 vCPUs, 8GiB memory, under different land transaction density conditions and node failure conditions. A community consisting of twenty-one peers belonging to nine organizations, was subject to evaluation. The island wide solution records higher throughput, lower latency and tolerance for fail-stop conditions than the regional distributed land ledger. Further, the island wide solution does not show a significant drop in throughput up to two crash failures out of seven Kafka brokers in production scale deployment.

Online communication has increased steadily over the past decades. It has become common practice that the identities of content creators do not have to be revealed. The use of abbreviations or pseudonyms is a de facto standard in online communities. Real identities are hidden behind these and protocol-based identifiers such as Internet Protocol Addresses are difficult to assign to real persons. Due to the increase of fake news and hate postings, the obligatory use of “real names” has been and still is discussed worldwide. In some countries, a “clear name” respectively “real name” obligation has been implemented or such laws are in the process of being implemented. One example is South Korea which gained international fame in 2007 as a “clear name” obligation has been introduced by law. The law was repealed shortly afterward.

In Germany, the “Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz 2017” was passed. In Austria, a draft of the “Bundesgesetz über Sorgfalt und Verantwortung im Netz” (SVN-G) was submitted for review in 2019. Newspaper platforms and large corporations such as Twitter or Google would be affected by the obligation to use “clear names”. The architecture drafted in the SVN-G was analyzed by us and numerous weak points were identified. Thus, we propose a significantly improved architecture as well as an implementation outline using blockchain-based identity providers.

This paper discusses the problem of data quality in blockchain applications at three levels of abstraction, i.e., conceptual, logical and physical. Conceptually, it makes explicit the need for information of typical data quality metrics for their online assessment. Logically, it analyzes how the adoption of blockchain technology affects the availability of the data needed for quality assessment. Physically, it identifies a set of implementation options that take into account the information needs of metrics and the restrictions by the technology; special attention at this level is paid to Ethereum and Solidity. Two case studies put the identified patterns and abstractions into context and showcase their importance in real-world distributed applications and processes.

The main goal of the article was to present the results of the process maturity assessment of organizations using artificial intelligence technology on the Israeli market. As a result of the theoretical study, an empirical gap was identified, resulting from the lack of studies addressing the issues of process maturity in organizations using artificial intelligence. The research question was constructed in the work. RQ: What is the level of process maturity of the organization on the Israeli market that has declared the implementation of artificial intelligence technology? Empirical proceedings were carried out on a sample of 19 non-probabilistically selected organizations functioning in Israel. The multi-dimensional process maturity assessment model (MMPM) was used to assess the level of implementation of process solutions, adjusted to the specificity of the given sector. The study used research methods, such as: quantitative and qualitative bibliometric analysis, survey and statistical methods. The first chapter presents the results of the quantitative and qualitative bibliometric analysis. Then, the next chapter characterized the concept of process maturity and described the applied MMPM methodology. The third chapter describes the population of the surveyed organizations on the Israeli market. The next chapter presents the detailed results of the empirical proceedings. The last chapter contains the study results and discussion. The article ended with a summary, which included directions for further proceedings and outlined the limitations resulting from the adopted research methodology. As a result of the study, the vast majority of organizations were qualified to the first level, identified as a state in which the fragmentary occurrence of elements of the process approach in management was observed.

DEMO (Design Engineering Methodology for Organization) has its foundation in the DEMO Enterprise Ontology (DEO), and provides a strong theoretical foundation and a generic platform for business process modeling. The REA (Resource-Event-Agent) ontology, which originates from accountancy systems, provides a domain-specific platform for value modeling business processes. Rather than traditional approaches to accountancy, REA captures the details of each resource under an enterprise’s control, and thus is able to offer a wider, more precise, and more up-to-date range of reports. Despite its great potential, REA ontology suffers from anomalies which have their origin in the absence of rigorous theoretical foundations. These anomalies can be overcome either by introducing rigorous theoretical foundations for the current REA ontology, or by useful collaboration of REA ontology with an ontology that provides a strong theoretical foundation. The paper deals with the latter option. It not only contemplates different aspects of both ontologies, but also analyzes and proposes a possible way for collaboration between these modeling frameworks.

Land as an immovable property represents an important asset for which such crucial aspects evolve as ownership rights, security of land records, possible disputes, corruption risks and sundry transparency matters of land registry processes. Critical issues are traceability of records, hazards of document forgery as well as vulnerability to various errors. Delivering accountable land registry systems and particularly increasing validity of land titles is vital for present-day governments in terms of suppressing corruption, eliminating red tape, enhancing transparency, improving speed of the stated public service and eradicating risks of possible disputes. Furthermore, integration of the blockchain technology into land registries leads to achieving a disruptive transformation of public-service provision systems. This Georgia focused casestudy-based research ascertains how blockchain technology resolves the issues above concerning contemporary land registry systems and examines determinants for a successful application of the digital novelty. The findings from semi-structured interviews and document studies we analyze and scrutinize the present blockchain model of the Georgian government. Additionally, we provide recommendations for administering the blockchain-based digital solutions present in the public land registry service-provision system.

Business process management (BPM) is a traditional approach to achieve process excellence, and a key success factor of digitization initiatives. It facilitates strategic alignment by streamlining business processes, and harmonizing business and IT domains. The main goal of this research is to map BPM and enterprise architecture management (EAM), to provide a systematic review of EAM-supported process optimization methods. BPM is focusing on the business architecture layer of EAM frameworks, so EAM can be a major facilitator of BPM lifecycle activities, especially the optimization phase. Our proposed analytical framework can contribute to the evaluation of process architecture, considering the context and dependencies of the process-related models to the components of an information architecture.

Organizations continuously aim for improved business performance through a process-oriented transformation. Such a transformation, however, is not limited only to the organizational level, but permeates the individual level as well. Research so far has not investigated the role of employees’ behavior and thinking, as individual process-orientation remains under-researched. A first step in this regard, is the clarification of the main construct of interest. Hence, the goal of this paper is to provide deeper insights into the construct of process orientation at the individual level. The paper proposes a two-dimensional conceptualization of individual process orientation that distinguishes between process-oriented thinking and process-oriented behavior. Drawing on this conceptualization, the paper provides a four-stage approach to developing a scale for measuring individual process orientation.

Process management is a performance-relevant capability that integrates exploitation of existing processes and exploration of new processes. Although important, it has been neglected and not well addressed organizational-level practice within the dynamic capabilities view (DCV). Therefore, this two-study survey research examines whether process management (i.e., process exploration and process exploitation) capabilities represent potential mediating/moderating mechanisms between dynamic capabilities (i.e., learning and coordinating) and business performance. Specifically, a dual-stage moderated mediation model has been developed and tested on the cross-industry sample of 104 Croatian companies (Study 1) and international sample of 529 manufacturing companies (Study 2). Conditional process analyses using PROCESS macro for SPSS revealed that: (1) the coordinating capability has a supplementary effect on learning capabilities in pursuing process exploration; (2) high process exploration and low process exploitation capabilities result in highest levels of business performance; and (3) the multi-capability mix should be used to explain business performance results. Our findings give support to the capability view of business process management.

Robotic process automation (RPA) emerges as a new technology which is focused on automation of repetitive, routine, rule-based human tasks, aiming to bring benefits to the organizations that decide to implement such software solution. Since RPA is a relatively new technology available on the market, the scientific literature on the topic is still scarce. Therefore, this paper aims to investigate how academic community defines RPA and to which extent has it been investigated in the literature in terms of the state, trends, and application of RPA. Moreover, the difference between RPA and business process management is also addressed. In order to do so, the systematic literature review (SLR) based on Web of Science and Scopus databases has been conducted. The paper provides the results of the conducted SLR on RPA providing an overview of the RPA definitions and practical usage as well as benefits of its implementation in different industries.

Business Process Diagrams serve several purposes, including process analysis, process-related communication, and process automation. Considering communication, modelers must ensure that all participants understand a process diagram and the corresponding notation in the same way. With globalization, this might get challenging, since different cultural environments may imply implicitly different meanings to specified symbols, whereas the same concepts may be associated with different representations. Thus, our efforts are directed towards investigating the intuitiveness of common Business Process Concepts’ representations. In this manner, we performed empirical research on a sample of novice modelers in two cultural environments, who were instructed to design graphical representations for the defined concepts. Our findings show which Business Process Concepts’ representations are intuitive to novice modelers and how the cultural background impacts it.

Organizations increasingly participate in and rely on inter-organizational processes to carry out work. However, inter-organizational processes may be complex, especially when there is a need to introduce and decide upon changes that affect the process. In this paper we examine the problems that may arise when changing inter-organizational processes. As the foundation for our examination, we use a case study performed at a healthcare region in Sweden. In the case, a number of potential changes to an inter-organizational process have been identified. Based on the analysis of the case, we identify the basic constituents that enterprise models need to contain in order to be useful tools for representing changes to inter-organizational processes.

Business Process Management is considered to be an up-to-date approach to an organization’s operation, while process structures offer a sense of order. Knowledge resources are treated as inseparable elements of operation of processes. Moreover Knowledge Management may not be separate from Business Process Management. Modeling of the process of Knowledge Management is intended to systematize these informal rules and relations existing in process-based organizations. The main aim of this paper is to identify the modeling of the process of Knowledge Management in enterprises, which implemented Business Process Management. The article presents selected research results carried out in Poland on 122 process-oriented enterprises.

This paper analysis BPM adoption in context of companies operating in Serbia. The goals were to determine level of BPM adoption in companies in Serbia and identify what factors contributing the most to the success in BPM adoption. Questionnaire was used for data collection. BPM adoption was measured through Process Performance Index (PPI). Parametric statistical tests were used on survey data to identify factors that contribute the most to successful BPM adoption. Results in this research shows several factors that significantly contribute to success of BPM adoption measured through PPI. First, companies who have formally trained their employees in process analysis/redesign experienced more significant success in BPM adoption. Second factor is strategic orientation, expressed through criteria such as enterprise-wide business process architecture design and change efforts, increased market share and revenue, reduction of business risk, etc. This shows that strategic focus can even make up for the lack of operational knowledge, and increase chances for success of BPM adoption.

Although business process management (BPM) and customer experience management (CXM) as strategic approaches aim to fulfill organizational prerequisites for achieving customer satisfaction, and the customer focus has been in the definitions of BPM from its very beginning, related efforts are often not aligned in practice. We posit that the analysis, and consequently, the results would be more successful if a structured, BPM-CXM convergent approach is followed. The paper proposes a convergence model for BPM-CXM and the findings of its initial validation are briefly reported along with considerations for its implementation and the expected benefits.

In Corvinus Business School we are organizing innovation projects with the methodology of Design Thinking from year to year with multiple partners representing more industries. In this paper, we use three industries as case studies to show our experiences of the added value of Customer Journey Mapping and Analysis in Design Thinking projects.

This paper studies ‘the order effect’ in decision making based on classification results of 120 000 citizen claims to Moscow Government. We use machine learning methods and derive that with 60% probability the first out of two consequent claims is prioritized. We conclude that this impact must be considered whilst developing artificial intelligence units.