Blockchain isn’t so much about technology …
For a while, Blockchain has been kept at the forefront of emerging technologies for enterprises whether in healthcare, retail, or consumer products. At least every some conversations seems to mention it. It also seems like the fix for food shortage, to sanctity of clinical trials, to veracity of organic food. Then, it should be a surprise that one can’t find a real cogent game changing implementation of blockchain yet.
Wait a second, before you point flames in this direction. Of course, Bitcoin is a real implementation which changed a lot of thinking and spawned some more of these currencies and payment mechanism for drugs, guns for the bad ‘uns and bunch of other illegal merchandise on the dark web.
There are quite a few more private implementations including those of United Airlines (for ticket settlement), Delta (running POCs for a pharma cold-chain), Starbucks (tracing farm to retail) for example.
There is one “public” blockchain platform (named Interbank Information Network) based on the opensource Ethereum network created by JPMC. Some 7-8 Indian banks and another 300 odd banks signed up globally to hasten payment transaction. JPMC owned Quorum owned IIN. Yesterday Quorum was sold to privately held ConsenSys, and the new company will be known as ConsenSys Quorum and has been invested in by JPMC. Yes, that is convoluted in way that Airlines buy planes to sell it to a leasing company and then lease the equipment back. But, we digress.
From even a technology perspective Blockchain hasn’t yet lived up to the hype and most enterprise projects are in experimentation mode. It isn’t yet enabling a digital business revolution across business ecosystems. Gartner predicts the year of impact to be 2028, when blockchain becomes fully scalable technically and operationally.
There aren’t too many of these examples. In fact, Gartner moved Blockchain, as an overall technology, into the trough of disillusionment last year. It continues to feel that limited uses cases are being seen among early adopters in supply-chain-related and payments-related use cases.
There was an ambitious effort last year to get (at least) the health insurance companies, in India, together along with hospitals on a platform to hasten and ease payments. IRDAI, the regulatory body, played an indifferent and non-committal role. Lack of trust between hospitals and insurance companies and among the insurance companies themselves more or less put paid to the effort. There were at least three different sets of technology providers interested and had started initial work.
Often we hear that blockchain implementations will work wonderfully for “fresh” retailers in India, thus enabling close tracking. The problem, in this case, really is that of shrinkage and not tracking. Similar conversations pop up in networked logistics businesses too. There has been some success in some of these niche sectors. In either of these cases, success could be achieved when the entire value chain can be controlled by one organization which deals with multiple suppliers and vendors.
The problem arises when the control, for overall operations, is distributed among different organizations who either compete, or are indifferent to the success of other organizations. Throw in lack of trust, industry body ignorance and regulatory body apathy and the likelihood of success gets low.
And that is exactly the problem with a the Health Industry eco-system, as in the diagram above. You will appreciate this is a complex and non-linear network of data exchange.
For it to become mainstream, blockchain business users should have to worry less about the technicalities e.g. picking the right platform, the right smart contract language, the right system interfaces, or the right consensus algorithms.
Is there technology, blockchain or otherwise which can sort the problem? Surely. Is such a platform technically feasible? Definitely. Does the state of infrastructure allow it? Of course, both AWS, Azure and a host of others can support this. Scalability and interoperabality of Blockchain platforms will enable smart contract portability and cross chain functionality between permissioned and public blockchains; with higher data confidentiality. These aren’t too far away.
The problem then lies in non-linear business workflows coming together and the business interoperability being supported by players in an eco-system. The lack of trust in each other has to go, and reliance on clean technology has to increase. This, in most cases, needs some education among the business leaders. Same holds true for industry bodies and regulators (who are manned by industry personnel) as well. There has to be a step forward from their independent bodies and strong encouragement provided. In some cases trade bodies from different industries (payer and provider, for example, in health care) have to come together and shake hands.
How have you planned to utilise Blockchain technology for Digital Transformation of your business? Is it internal facing, or customer facing? We would love to hear from you about your experiences.
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