Blockchain Technology emerged recently in the area of Business Process Management and is still in its infancy. This paper analyses and evaluates the current scientific literature on the subject matter and synthesizes common topics, in order to create an understanding of the status quo. In a structured literature review, more than 300 publications were identified, of which 24 were finally selected as relevant to the cross-sectional topic of Blockchain and Business Process Management (BPM). A quantitative analysis affirms the recent upcoming of the relatively young research field and narrows the identified papers into three topic clusters, namely application areas and challenges, process architecture and design, and process execution related publications.
Cross-organizational business processes involving multiple participants are choreographed, thus rely on mutual trust of collaborators or need to be coordinated by a central instance. Using Smart Contracts, business processes can be executed without a mutually trusted and centralized orchestrating authority. Former Blockchain-based execution framework proposals focus on orchestration diagrams as a basis for execution. Contrary, this work focuses on BPMN process collaboration diagrams as implementation basis and makes additional transformation steps obsolete. With the herein proposed framework for execution of cross-organizational process collaborations, another approach for the implementation and execution of interorganizational processes on a Blockchain is presented, including a voting mechanism for process deployment as well as a subscription service to facilitate process handovers between participants more efficiently. The framework is exemplified and evaluated with a use case from a large German industrial manufacturing company.
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