How to Develop a GDPR-Compliant Blockchain Solution for Cross-Organizational Workflow Management: Evidence from the German Asylum Procedure

Abstract

Blockchain technology has the potential to resolve trust concerns in cross-organizational workflows and to reduce reliance on paper-based documents as trust anchors. Although these prospects are real, so is regulatory uncertainty. In particular, the reconciliation of blockchain with Europe's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is proving to be a significant challenge. We tackled this challenge with the German Federal Office for Migration and Refugees. Here, we explain how we used Action Research to guide the Federal Office in creating a GDPR-compliant blockchain solution for the German asylum procedure. Moreover, we explain the architecture of the Federal Office's solution and present two design principles for developing GDPRcompliant blockchain solutions for crossorganizational workflow management.

The Evolution of an Architectural Paradigm - Using Blockchain to Build a Cross-Organizational Enterprise Service Bus

“…The privacy service resembles a transformation service. It is a vital module for GDPR-compliance [17,31]. It provides erasable mapping tables to match functional IDs (i.e., IDs that enable all authorities involved in the asylum procedure to clearly identify individual asylum applications) to pseudonymous blockchain identifiers.…”

“…Implementing IT solutions for the coordination of processes in federally organized governments comes with several regulatory, organizational, and technical challenges. For instance, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) introduces a set of strict requirements when personal data is processed [17,31]. Another key challenge is the federal separation of competencies, which makes the delegation of process governance to a central authority difficult and, often, undesirable.…”

BlockELM A Public Blockchain Freight Exchange Protocol

“…We were guided by the design process for blockchains by Xu [51] to evaluate different options in the implementation, which then influenced the architecture. Layering the data store was also inspired by a literature study [16].…”

What Do We Really Need? A Systematic Literature Review of the Requirements for Blockchain-Based E-government Services

“…Also, public institutions increasingly acknowledge the enormous potential of blockchain technology for governmental services as they address current challenges by strategically identifying promising use cases of the technology [27]. Thereby, use cases are not only evaluated on a conceptual level but also in pilot projects [28]. For example, an advanced use case for digital identities exists in Estonia using the e-Identity ID card on a blockchain [9].…”