Decentralized workflow

- dFLOW -

dFlow - "decentralized Workflow"- an innovative and simple platform for defining and executing B2B collaborations and business flows.

Problem: The digital transformation has reached companies individually, and it only maps B2B collaboration to a limited extent. Digital, cross-company processes and communication models optimizes B2B collaboration, but the issues of data sovereignty, integrity, trust, auditability, and ownership of business logic between participants are often not easy to resolve. To this end, the use of blockchain technology offers significant advantages, but the development, use and operation of such applications is often very complex and only accessible to technical personnel.

Our solution: The aim of the dFlow platform is to make the potential and benefits of decentralized B2B applications accessible to a very wide range of users by introducing "visual smart contracts". The simplicity of use and self-explanatory logic is intended to extend the use of digitized B2B collaboration for business processes beyond organizational boundaries.

• Create a visual, self-explanatory way to model the definition and execution of cross-enterprise business processes on a blockchain-based platform - and enable execution of the flows, based on predefined business roles.

• Implement domain - specific business flow libraries for reusing of know-how, enable methodologies to be build and policies to be enforced. 

• Implies a drastic reduction of coding activity for the design and lifecycle of cross-organizational business processes - low-code blockchain.

• Store the process definition (logic of the business flow) and all data related to all executions of the business flows in blockchain (from the past or on-going); building up an immutable log of the complete B2B collaboration. 

• Avoid discontinuities in the digital communication between organizations and avoid process breaches at organization boundaries.

Public or private organizations, enterprises, or SMEs, will map processes for cross-organizational communication and digitize, automate, and simplify collaboration in form of business flows. In addition, auditing processes, process execution or complete company operations is highly simplified, as auditing is directly built in the process and organizational setup; the auditor can directly be part of the process, enforcing compliance.

This venture combines a state-model engine with decentralization in a multi-party environment. Apart from enriching Process Management with the decentralization qualities via Blockchain, we also aim to keep the rapid business application development nature of BPM solutions, allowing for a collaborative visual representation & configuration of the data model, business logic (processes, rules) and UI. The same applies for the visual monitoring, operational insight & analytics of these processes we find important not to loose in the process of decentralization. Another third important aspect to ensure is the lifecycle management & governance of the business application that has to be covered.

The dFlow platform is in an advanced stage of development, getting support from dfinity Foundation and building the platfom on top of ICP. We are currently working with initial customers for setting up business flows. Relevant use cases have been identified in government processes (inter-agency communication), procurement, sustainable development, supply chain or general cross-enterprise management of shared resources or assets.

What are the main advantages of such a system?

• At foremost it allows Organizations to collaborate on an entirely new level, sharing the implementation of a complex process and the various roles they may participate within instead of sharing a design document about the process and the specification of the message exchanges they should follow. The sharing of the implementation also applies of sharing the lifecycle of the process and the governance processes, which are evolving the processes throughout their lifetime.

• As the implementation of the process is on the Blockchain, all important & corresponding data is recorded there as well making any dispute resolution very fast and straight forward and providing the regulators direct access & runtime verification of compliance. Please note that there are numerous techniques how to ensure data privacy rules between the organizations to control, which Organization has what kind of exposure & control to some particular data set.

• We inherit all the benefits of Blockchain technologies being full transparency & insight, immutability, global accessibility, no downtime SLA, incorruptibility, complete history log, etc.

Our next step will be to work on business integration (via using Oracles) and finalize the usage of decentralized Identity Management capabilities (such as Hyperledger Indy).