Incubating a Blockchain Initiative

Blockchain as a technology has not yet matured to production grade. There are still challenges with scalability and latency, but considering the amount of investment and the push from industry heavy-weights, we can safely assume that, those challenges will be resolved in the coming months.

This is the time when managers need to start experimenting with the technology and start evaluating the business cases. Such endeavors will require financing and one can't expect to recover the amount for most cases; however it is very important for organizations to fail fast and learn in order to capitalize on the emerging opportunities and protect against potential disruption.

In my earlier discourse on challenges, I had mentioned that Building a Business case for Blockchain is not so simple; nonetheless there are some pointers for you to evaluate when Blockchain can be useful.

Evaluate the Business scenario for using Blockchain

Typically, Blockchain is useful for processes that have information exchange across multiple parties. A centrally managed (silo-ed) data base managed by a single enterprise acting as a broker of information is not good for transparent and frictionless exchange of information.

Can you form a consortium and make every party use the new process?

To make the participants adhere to the new process you need to have the market clout. Unless the parties use the new system and participate in the consensus process the benefit of Blockchain will remain unrealized.

Blockchain is still early in the adoption curve. Much advocacy is still required to within organisations to gather financing (budget) and much know-how is required to be able to deliver a Minimum Viable Product. .