Business Process Compliance and Blockchain: How Does the Ethereum Blockchain Address Challenges of Business Process Compliance?

Second generation blockchain technologies such as Ethereum can be used not only for financial transactions but also for cross-organizational processes, for applications in the pharmaceutical industry and even in the field of Business Process Compliance (BPC). However, there are many challenges in the field of BPC. Thus, we raised the following research question: How does the Ethereum blockchain address challenges of BPC? To answer this question, we conducted a structured literature review to identify challenges in BPC as well as features of the Ethereum blockchain that may solve the selected BPC challenges. As a result, we identified 21 BPC challenges and categorized these into legal, organizational, human-centered, technical and economic challenges. We found that the technical and organizational BPC challenges were those that Ethereum could best solve, while human-centered challenges could be less well addressed. Furthermore, the implementation of the Ethereum blockchain leads to additional challenges, such as the immutability of illegal content within the Ethereum blockchain or the error-proneness and zero-defect tolerance of smart contracts.