Business Process Monitoring on Blockchains: Potentials and Challenges

The ability to enable a tamper-proof distribution of immutable data has boosted the studies around the adoption of blockchains also in Business Process Management. In this direction, current research work primarily focuses on blockchain-based business process design, or on execution engines able to enact processes through smart contracts. Although very relevant, less studies have been devoted so far on how the adoption of blockchains can be beneficial to business process monitoring. This work goes into this direction by providing an insightful analysis to understand the benefits as well as the hurdles of blockchain-enabled business process monitoring. In particular, this work considers the adoption of programmable blockchain platforms to manage the generation, distribution, and analysis of business process monitoring data.