Towards the Tokenization of Business Process Models using the Blockchain Technology and Smart Contracts

Abstract

Business process modeling helps organizations to capture their workflows visually as diagrams that could be then used to share best practices, identify inefficiencies in ongoing activities, instruct employees, use them as reference solutions, etc. Design and analysis of business process models are essential technologies of the Business Process Management approach, which is successfully adopted and practiced nowadays by many large and medium enterprises. Therefore, business process models should be considered as organizational assets that depict usable and competitive business solutions, which value could be proven by benchmarking. Single reference business process models or even collections of business process models are already accessible on Internet, sometimes for free or, usually, for purchasing because of the value of transferred knowledge. However, peer-to-peer exchange of business process models on a commercial basis is still far from a unification. At the same time, the tremendous growth of the cryptocurrency market and the adoption of Bitcoin by governments (first by El Salvador in June 2021) makes crypto-economics, also referred to as “tokenomics”, usable for organizational knowledge sharing and exchanging without third party authorities, such as banks, or payment systems. Moreover, collaborating parties could reach a consensus when exchanging business process models using smart contracts and crypto-tokens to access shared knowledge artifacts. Therefore, this paper proposes an approach to business process model tokenization using blockchain technology and smart contracts. There was proposed as an Ethereum smart contract that combines features of the business process model collection and the non-fungible token. A prototype of a decentralized application was developed and its usage was demonstrated.