The key actions that would hasten the adoption of blockchain technology at the corporate level.
Let’s start with the subject of how businesses normally adopt emerging technologies.
What is the typical process for enterprise adoption?
- The primary drivers of enterprise adoption range from cost savings and cost reduction to cost improvement, capability and workload consolidation, increased workforce productivity, improved security, and, of course, the current buzz surrounding the need to digitally transform people, processes, and technology in order to prepare for the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution.
- A closer look at the cloud migration wave reveals that it was first motivated by cost and the chance to reduce capital expenditures at the expense of the cloud providers.
- Testing, archival and secondary storage, computational resources for spiky workloads, and other early applications were among those that moved to the cloud.
- Enterprises started to experience and gain from the enormous time-to-market advantages and the business and IT agility that these platforms were now offering as the pace of innovation by cloud platform vendors started to outpace that of the on-premise vendors with technologies like serverless computing, for example.
- Naturally, along the process, it became clear that cloud stacks were frequently substantially more secure than on-premise data centres and that moving to the cloud offered the chance to review the corporate architecture(s) and combine workloads, further reducing costs.
Why has acceptance of blockchain in businesses been so slow?
- Migration was used as a keyword in the previous sentence.
- The enterprise IT mindset has been one of migration or “re-platforming” at the expense of re-architecting since the wave of PC-based application migration to the client-server model in the mid-1990s.
- As opposed to re-architecting, which came considerably later, cloud migration was first and foremost a cost-driven decision to lift-and-shift.
- Because incentives, rewards, and punishments for each entity, system, and user are “baked” into the architecture of the technological stack for the first time in history, blockchain platforms are special.
- The first “economic platform” in computing history is a blockchain.
- Even the ability to lift and relocate legacy programmes is a challenge with blockchain platforms.
- Remember that the advent of virtual machine architectures and containerization was essential for streamlining and accelerating cloud migration; blockchain platforms just lack a comparable capacity.
- Therein lies a crucial adoption roadblock, resulting in a plethora of pilot projects and proof-of-concepts that eventually fall off the IT roadmap.
- Blockchain platforms do not simply offer a new set of “plumbing” capabilities for IT to transfer to or re-platform.
How will the adoption of the blockchain in businesses grow?
- Incentives: This is a platform for commerce.
- There has never been a truly economic platform in the history of computing.
- From the mainframe to the PC and client-server to service-oriented architecture, or SOA, and more recently, cloud computing, there have been preceding waves of platforms.
- They all serve as a container for infrastructure and application capabilities, providing a stack for applications to be deployed, built upon, and migrated to.
- The rallying cry for businesses has frequently been blockchain rather than crypto.
- The problem is that special commercial benefits are powered by and enabled by the inbuilt crypto-economic protocols.
- The initial exchange offering, initial coin offering, and security token offering models are not necessary for the IT sector to comprehend.
- Any business and/or IT organisation that overlooks the inherent economic platform, however, is only able to utilise “half” of the potential of the blockchain stack.
- Business and IT must objectively assess the role that (economic) incentives play in their blockchain applications and systems and understand the economics of the blockchain stack.
- The single biggest factor preventing adoption in the business sector is this.
- You are NOT re-platforming legacy programmes; this is more than just a “stack.”
- Blockchain platforms are “multi-party” stacks by nature, intrinsically created to bring together numerous entities, including systems and people.
- This originates from their history and builds on the fundamental distributed ledger capabilities.
- Even while users can close their eyes and only view the (perhaps centralised) ledger, this defeats the whole point.
- Re-architecting your legacy application makes commercial sense if there is a business justification for building on a blockchain platform.
- IT shouldn’t try to replatform current centralised cloud applications either in their current state or with a thin layer of decentralisation.
- This is not the way to show the business a return on its investment.
- Do you have an economic architecture? You have a business architecture.
Enterprise Blockchain Consulting Company can quickly bring up their portfolio of business architecture artefacts, information architecture artefacts, application architecture artefacts, and technology architecture artefacts because they are proficient with architectures’ ontologies and frameworks, including the Zachman Framework and the Business, Information, Application, Technical model, or BIAT, among others.
Although required, having a business architecture is insufficient.
Businesses and IT must collaborate to develop and maintain an economic architecture based on a fundamental set of incentive models in order to successfully navigate the disruptive prospects made possible by blockchain platforms.
- Where is your token taxonomy beyond design patterns?
In general, the architecture depicts the framework of a system, but it also shows the underlying design patterns, which show how to organise classes to address recurring issues.
They operate at many levels of abstraction and offer the unbiased clarity needed to design and manage large-scale applications and systems.
To develop the token taxonomy for their enterprises (and partners) and the underlying token definitions that are then exposed in their economic architectures, businesses and IT must collaborate.
The requirements for token definitions should be explicit and easily understood before being codified into executable software objects.
- Adoption and change management
Is game theory understood by your IT department?
Large businesses have virtually always found adoption and change management to be a major headache, as it involves a continuous set of procedures and the hiring of high-priced consultants in an effort to persuade users to utilize new tools and applications.
Being the economic platforms that they are, blockchain stacks can take advantage of the built-in incentive model to spur user adoption and bring about change.
It is crucial for IT to comprehend and make use of game-theory strategies based on the underlying incentive models.
- Governance
Institutional economics are essential for coordinating firms and IT.
Aligning companies and IT to promote governance has been the constant source of frustration for IT and business executives, if adoption and change management have been a disaster.
Today, the majority of the IT portfolio is governed by an external set of duties and activities, often supported by expensive consultants trying to reduce the gap in visibility.
The underlying crypto-economic protocols of blockchain platforms integrate governance into the systems and applications themselves.
However, organisations and IT today require a new lens through which to view their IT portfolio. Principles and techniques from the study of institutional economics are used to promote the inherent alignment of business and IT in these emerging systems and the IT portfolios to which they belong.
- Value chain tokenization
The new moat is in-network tokens. Businesses compete for market dominance and customers in value chains rather than islands.
The fundamental components of competitive advantage are the activities and the entire value chain in which they are engaged.
Platforms based on blockchain offer a fundamentally new means to improve competitive strategy.
In-network tokens, also known as privately labeled/branded stable currencies, have the power to completely rethink the value chain, rebuild the customer acquisition and support funnels, create new heights of vendor and supplier network effects, and create unmatched levels of global affinity and loyalty.
Conclusion
It is obvious that blockchain platforms have the ability to create vast amounts of value, and their recurrent inclusion in corporate executive and board-level mandates indicates the potential they have to reshape and reimagine business ecosystems.
The essay offers a seven-step process to quicken blockchain technology adoption and increase commercial value in the corporation.