Trust-Aware Process Design

Abstract

Longitudinal studies point to the global erosion of trust in institutions and their business processes. As a result, the provision of trusted processes has become a new design criterion that exceeds the traditional Business Process Management (BPM) goals of time, cost, and quality, and also goes beyond security and privacy concerns. The notion of trust, however, has rarely been studied in the context of BPM. This paper initiates the conceptualization of trust in BPM by providing two new artefacts, i.e. a four-stage model for the design of trusted processes and a related meta model. Both have been derived from relevant theories and existing, general trust conceptualizations. Two exploratory case studies and secondary data have facilitated the identification of an initial set of application scenarios and trust requirements.