Sebastian Lahajnar

High-tech companies operating in the field of blockchain technology use the Initial Coin Offering (ICO) to raise start-up capital. It is a fairly new, non-standardized and poorly regulated way of collecting start-up funding that can bring high yields to investors in the short term, but investors also have to be ready to take on high risks. The purpose of this article is to define a decision model for the evaluation of ICO projects, which provides a systematic, transparent, methodological approach to making decisions on investing in them. For that purpose, the authors analyzed a number of factors, which directly or indirectly influence the successful implementation of ICO projects, and the researchers extracted the most important among them (model parameters). In order to build the decision model, used a qualitative method for the hierarchical multi-parameter evaluation of DEX, which using symbolic parameters and combining functions in the form of if-then rules ensures the most freely and flexible combining assessment parameters into a uniform model. In the article, the use of proposed decision model was tested in practice on multiple ICO processes. The article details the decision-making process in the case of CargoX, and also summarizes the results of the evaluation of ICOs Tokens.net, BitClave, Neuromation and WePower.

Effective business process management is one of the key tasks of every organization if it wants to compete successfully on the market and satisfy the needs of its customers. Although there are many established best practices, techniques, and more or less complex methods in business process management, no approach can fulfill a typical organization’s needs and wants. The key to success lies in developing new or adapting existing approaches for business process management to suit the unique characteristics of individual organizations and projects. This demands a solid methodological framework and a clearly defined work process. The aim of the paper is to apply situational method engineering concepts within the realm of business process management, thereby tackling the challenge mentioned above. As a result, a situational method engineering framework is defined to construct and customize business process management methods. The study proposes the conceptual foundations of the framework and a set of processes for constructing holistic and tailored methods that cover various aspects of business process management (analysis, modeling, management, etc.). The basis of the framework is represented by general method components at a higher level of abstraction, which are assembled into holistic methods via interfaces and are transformed into versions adapted to specific situations using tailoring rules. The practical applicability of the proposed framework is validated through its implementation in a project at a large manufacturing company, where it is used to develop both a general and customized business process management method.

The article explores the correlation strength of the ten most important cryptocurrencies, emphasizing the examination of differences during the periods of rising and falling prices. The daily and weekly returns of selected cryptocurrencies are taken as the basis for calculating and determining the correlation strength using the Pearson correlation coefficient. The survey covers the period from the beginning of 2017 to Bitcoin’s last local bottom in mid-March 2020. Research findings are as follows: 1) the most important cryptocurrencies are mostly moderately positively correlated with each other over time; 2) correlation strength decreases slightly during the bull period, but mostly remain in the range of moderate correlation; 3) correlation strength increases significantly during the bear period, with most cryptocurrencies strongly correlated with each other. The results do not change significantly if the daily or weekly cryptocurrency returns are used as the basis. A strong correlation in the period of falling prices prevents the effective diversification of the cryptocurrency portfolio, which must be considered when investing funds in the cryptocurrency market.