Pathway to Operationalizing Blockchain: Challenges & Strategies for Implementing Blockchain in a Legacy Paradigm
Whether it’s hope or hype, boom or bust, excitement or agitation — blockchain continues to introduce stark polarizing perspectives. Business leaders have trepidation about wading too deep into uncharted waters. ‘Blue oceans’ of untapped value innovation have seemingly dried up in the span of only a few years. So what’s changed? Perhaps it’s the deep realization that implementing blockchain in any legacy paradigm (which most businesses find themselves in) is very difficult. Even a recent McKinsey & Company article posits concerns about blockchain’s timeliness from a Return on Investment (ROI) perspective. Industries spanning the spectrum of health care, banking & financial services, and supply chain have invested billions of dollars only to see very meager benefits (if that) — and it’s unclear if any ‘first-mover-advantage’ has been ascertained by early investors. The last MERL (Monitoring, Evaluation, Research, & Learning) Tech Conference held in Washington, DC evaluated 43 blockchain use cases against their business cases (cost savings, revenue potential, etc.) indicated little-to-no evidence than any of the researched use cases was able to achieve their purported business cases. So what gives?
There’s a common theme that’s becoming very apparent to those that are in the blockchain industry; I myself have seen this now for several years. The blockchain hype machine is still very much on overdrive, the sales pitches and glossy marketing campaigns of certain consulting companies would make you believe you’ve already missed the boat on blockchain’s true potential if you haven’t made an investment already, and many fluffy white papers filled with buzzwords are intended to confuse rather than to inform. There is a lack of permanency in blockchain implementations and future thought leadership around them — even the term ‘use case’ exudes with it a sense of transitory impermanence — as if no one is really sure that a ‘use case’ or a Proof of Concept (PoC) will ever get off the ground to larger scale adoption and operationalization. In fact, to this day, as much as people don’t want to hear this, Bitcoin & cryptocurrencies are the only successful mass proliferated instance of blockchain technology today. If anything, this points to the one…
