Enhancing business processes with trustworthiness using blockchain

Abstract

Blockchain technologies are intended to help enhance the trustworthiness of information, by improving transparency, traceability, and immutability of business logic and information, hence with the potential to be applicable to business process reengineering (BPR). However, an ad hoc approach to adopting blockchain technologies during BPR may lead to not better, but worse, than the current business processes, and with disappointments. In this paper, we present Fides - a framework for systematically utilizing blockchain towards enhancing business processes with trustworthiness. Fides takes a goal-oriented approach, in which trust-related concerns are explicitly represented as (soft)goals to be achieved, problems for achieving the goals are diagnosed, and then alternatives are explored in terms of business processes for eliminating or alleviating the problems, while at the same time achieving the goals. Finally, a selection is made among the alternatives that best utilize blockchain. To illustrate, and also see both strengths and weaknesses of Fides, a retail chain for a food supply chain is used throughout the paper, and is implemented using Ethereum and Hyperledger Fabric. Feedback from companies and students indicates that Fides leverages the level of confidence in the quality of the reengineered business processes, in utilizing blockchain.