• Lionel Palacin, Technical Evangelist at Bonitasoft


• 25.08.2017 09:45 am
Blockchain , Palacin is a technical evangelist at Bonitasoft, based in New York, traveling around the world to tech meetups and conferences. Previously, he managed the Bonitasoft Professional Services team as director of professional services worldwide. He started with Bonitasoft in San Francisco as a BPM delivery consultant. He was deployed to key Bonitasoft customers where he helped IT teams implement successful and complex BPM projects. Before working for Bonitasoft, Palacin worked with Bull in France as a Java developer. He has a master’s degree in computer science from Université de Nice-Sophia Antipolis in France.

Since bursting into general awareness through bitcoin, the technology called blockchain has extended its influence far beyond that starting point. This paradigm-shifting technology is revolutionizing how business is conducted by providing an entirely new way to exchange assets. As a result, blockchain is finding a home well beyond bitcoin.

Financial institutions are drawn to the inherent security, quick verification, and virtual continuity advantages of the blockchain technology. And as financial institutions worldwide undergo digital transformation to remain competitive, blockchain can play an important role.

Still, implementing blockchain technology, and building enterprise applications on top of blockchain, presents some daunting challenges. In addition to dealing with the overall complexity of blockchain, institutions must also navigate decisions about which blockchain implementation to choose among public (open-source) and multiple private implementations.

It turns out that the key concepts of blockchain are complementary with another major process-based technology: business process management (BPM). BPM technology has already been proven effective and trustworthy for building business applications. Using a BPM platform can simplify application development with blockchain, enabling institutions to use BPM to build production-ready blockchain applications in less time and with less risk—and to capitalize on BPM-blockchain integration to reuse and update those applications with greater ease.

Challenges to Implementing Blockchain Abound

The distributed digital ledger technology that blockchain technology uses to manage and validate transactions replaces any central authority with cryptography and algorithms. Clearly, this approach represents a radical departure from traditional treatments of financial transactions.

The appeal of blockchain technology is well known:

• Without the need to go through a central clearinghouse, blockchain can verify and settle financial transactions in seconds or minutes, rather than days or longer.
• It can increase the accuracy and security of transactions.
• Eliminating the middleman or central authority removes opportunities for fraud as well as human error.
• Transaction costs go down.

Seen as an immutable, unhackable distributed database of digital assets, blockchain technology is enabling a paradigm shift in how assets are exchanged. Already, many top financial institutions, as well as enterprises in a diverse range of markets, are experimenting with blockchain technology as a way to digitally track assets and their ownership.

But challenges to implementing blockchain technology persist, including:

• It’s extremely complex to set up and manage.
• Industry standards have not formed around blockchain.
• The regulatory landscape is uncertain, at best.
• Besides bitcoin, there are few successful models to build on.
• Implementing blockchain’s decentralized approach requires organizations to undergo a fundamental cultural shift.

In addition, both public and private blockchain implementations present impediments to adoption.

Open-source public implementations allow anyone to build applications on top of blockchain, but the potential lack of privacy makes many users unwilling to trust personal information to public blockchain implementations. Private blockchain implementations are more common, but their numerous and incompatible iterations force institutions to bet on a single private blockchain iteration and stick with it.

BPM Can Aid Blockchain Adoption

For either public or private blockchain approaches, financial institutions can use the familiar and established business process management technology as an entry point to overcome blockchain challenges.

BPM and blockchain share some basic concepts. For example, both technologies:

• Take a process-based approach. While BPM defines and manages everything that happens, from beginning to end, in any business process within an company, blockchain can also encompass processes between different companies.
• Share the notion of time and link. For both technologies, events happen (e.g., data is added or a task is executed) with a notion of time (when the event happened) and link (such as A –> B –> C). This time-link connection is the concept behind BPM, and it’s enforced by the blockchain immutable ledger.
• Depend on always-forward motion. With applications built on blockchain, data is added but never deleted. With BPM applications, once a task is completed, the process never reverses to go back and update the task.

BPM can greatly simplify and enhance the development of applications on blockchain. BPM’s graphically based low-code development capabilities allow blockchain application developers to abstract the complexity of blockchain and model it visually, so that it’s easier to quickly integrate applications with any public or private blockchain technology.

Financial institutions can use a BPM application platform to build a library of connectors, implementing generic processes that provide high-level business functionality that integrate blockchain technology. The application itself persists; different connectors allow the application to work easily with different blockchain technologies. Developers can design the connectors once, then reuse them in additional business applications to capitalize on new blockchain capabilities.

By using BPM instead of working directly with blockchain, financial institutions can reduce the effort, time, cost, and risk associated with building production-ready blockchain applications. A BPM platform enables those applications to work with diverse public and private blockchain implementations, so that financial institutions can avoid locking themselves into any particular blockchain technology or investing in a blockchain approach that ultimately fails.

BPM lets financial institutions ease into the use of blockchain, taking advantage of blockchain’s benefits with fewer challenges and risks.