Ricerc@Sapienza

This paper discusses a case study of blockchain used to address real business problems in the Italian banking sector. We use an exploratory case of the banking research and innovation centre promoted by the Italian Banking Association (ABI Lab), and show how the Interbank Spunta project implies the application of blockchain in interbank processes, with the aim at providing greater data transparency and visibility, faster execution, and the possibility of transfer checks and money directly within the application.

A Robinson list protects users' privacy against the always more frequent spam calls by allowing them to express a consent or a denial about market operator calls. Nowadays, Robinson lists run as centralised services. In this paper we discuss the possibility of implementing this valuable tool as a decentralised service. We identify the requirements of a decentralised Robinson list and the characteristics of a blockchain technology needed to support an implementation. Then, we present a general solution and a proof-of-concept implementation based on the Algorand technology.

Il contributo indaga le potenzialità dell’impiego della tecnologia blockchain per facilitare l’applicazione in concreto della regola legale della responsabilità solidale tra imprenditori per l’adempimento dei crediti di lavoro nel settore degli appalti, delle catene di subfornitura e del trasporto.

In 2015, the 17 "Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)" were announced by the United Nations, providing a common framework with the aim of creating a more sustainable society. SDG 9 "building resilient infrastructure, promoting inclusive and sustainable industrialization and fostering innovation", underlines the role that innovation plays in supporting sustainable development. It is recognized that the expansion of technology has the potential to accelerate humanity's progress by promoting social and economic development.

Blockchain technology can influence various aspects of the business even if empirical studies are still lacking to estimate the effective application of technology on corporate governance. Beyond its scientific-practical trendiness, blockchain should not be a matter of “if”, but a matter of “how” organizations are willing and able to integrate blockchain practices into their vision of the future, with ways to manage shareholders issues down to regular operations reaching and managing different levels of activism.

We propose blockchains and smart contracts as enabling technologies for an innovative type of supply chain management, with the goal of achieving higher levels of collaboration between the companies participating in the chain, which in turn pays in the form of higher levels of profitability and economic health for the participating enterprises. Our proposal goes far beyond simply using blockchains as decentralized systems to track the origin and delivery of goods, which is what most of the current blockchain projects on supply chains are focused on.

Blockchain technology ofers a sizable promise to rethink the way interorganizational business processes are managed because of its potential to realize execution without a central party serving as a single point of trust (and failure). To stimulate research on this promise and the limits thereof, in this article, we outline the challenges and opportunities of blockchain for business process management (BPM). We first refect how blockchains could be used in the context of the established BPM lifecycle and second how they might become relevant beyond.

This book constitutes the contributions presented at the Blockchain Forum and the Central and Eastern Europe Forum (CEE Forum) held at the 17th International Conference on Business Process Management, BPM 2019, which took place in Vienna, Austria, in September 2019. The Blockchain Forum deals with the use of blockchain for collaborative information systems. Conceptual, technical and application-oriented contributions are pursued within the scope of this theme. The Blockchain Forum received a total of 31 submissions; 10 full and 1 short paper were accepted for publication in this book.

Blockchain technology provides basic building blocks to support the execution of collaborative business processes involving mutually untrusted parties in a decentralized environment. Several research proposals have demonstrated the feasibility of designing blockchain-based collaborative business processes using a high-level notation, such as the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN), and thereon automatically generating the code artifacts required to execute these processes on a blockchain platform.