Speakers:

[These are my notes from the new Blockchain in Government conference, which is part of the KMWorld 2018 Conference. I’m publishing them as soon as possible after the end of a session, so they may contain the occasional typographical or grammatical error. Please excuse those. To the extent I’ve made any editorial comments, I’ve shown those in brackets.]

NOTES:

• Realities.
  • Commercial challenges:
    • Institutions (especially government) prefer low-risk, small-scale change. They have a hard time
    • Getting government to provide budget for an initial project.
    • Limited (non-existent) standards
    • Accreditation — how can we trust?
      • How can you trust a vendor to ensure that their code and coders are doing what the vendor claims?
      • Do you have enough security to encourage trust? Private permissioned blockchains are more likely to engender trust than public chains.
    • Let’s wait and see — what are others doing? Is there any evidence of success elsewhere?
    • De-risking through muscle memory
      • he partners with established players because this spurs a higher level of trust on the part of the government. Government is likely to trust a small startup.
    • Benefits aren’t clear or measurable –at this point, there is so little, easily available evidence of commercial success.
• How to Address the Realities? Think in terms of capability and benefit.
  • Reduce risk
    • data breach
    • IP leakage
  • Improve data assurance
    • that the version available is the latest version and is the same throughout the network
    • behavioral change making every action with the core data tracked and attributable
  • Increase efficiency
    • reducing back-office overhead
    • reducing human touchpoints — these touchpoints add error and inefficiency
    • reducing cycle time significantly
  • Enable “trust” in disparate networks — accept that some of these networks will be divergent and some may even be in conflict. So you have to find ways to drive trust across these networks nonetheless.
• Taking the First Steps.
  • Identify the real world challenges — what’s not working across your system?
  • Quantify the challenge (risk, efficiency, opportunity cost)
  • Define what “success” looks like
    • what does good look like for you
  • Select a solution provider
    • what part of your requirements are mandatory — speed, security, scalability?
    • the right solution provider will help the client analyze effectively their challenges and definition of success.
  • Ensure / enable stakeholder engagement — this may mean asking the client to put money on the table even for a proof of concept so that you can gain access to the stakeholder
  • Think big, start small, and scale quickly
    • paying for a proof of concept is small money, scaling is big money
    • when thinking about scalabiity and ROI, make one spend and then get multiple uses out of it
  • Resource properly
• Examples:
  • • They are helping a financial services consulting firm significantly expedite its process for completing security checks on potential consultants.
    • Ministry of Defence and the Cabinet Office need to expedite and ensure their personnel vetting process.
    • They want to use blockchain to manage design IP for highly secure, collaborative projects.