Silver Bullet for All Trust Issues? Blockchain-Based Trust Patterns for Collaborative Business Processes

Abstract

In recent years, the advancing digitization and internationalization of business processes led to increasing inter-organizational collaboration. In such collaborative processes, different organizations work together towards a single objective. Usually, subprocesses carried out by one collaborator are beyond the domain of influence of all other collaborators. This leads to uncertainty regarding the execution of the collaborative business process. If collaborators still want to engage in the process, trust is needed. Several studies identified blockchain and distributed ledger technologies as a promising tool to enhance trust in business processes. Therefore, this paper proposes and analyzes a taxonomy of blockchain-based trust design patterns from a process-centric perspective. Process engineers can utilize the taxonomy as an overview of how the blockchain technology can enhance trust in collaborative processes.