Successful blockchain adoption requires planning for converged business remodeling tasks and technical effort to experiment with the new ideas. If your first reaction to blockchain adoption is to quickly find a use case and start a project, please pause and read this statement:
‘Blockchain solutions lay the foundation for business innovation via digitalization and autonomous management of assets in an ecosystem, as well as the embodiment of business processes in technical protocols.’
What’s your reaction?
If everything is clear and makes sense without scratching your head or rolling your eyes, then you may proceed to define your use case.
If not, you may need to step back and do some homework before defining your use cases. Otherwise, there is a good chance that you will make a few of the following common mistakes:
- Having an incorrect technological perception
- Selecting weak or less relevant use cases
- Shortcutting business remodeling
- Focusing primarily on efficiency and record keeping
- Establishing flawed governance and operating model
- Oversimplifying legal and compliance requirements
- Missing implicit business agreements
- Designing monolithic smart contract architecture
- Facing constrained scalability and performance
- Being surprised by unforeseen technology maturity path
- Developing a solution in a silo without collaborating with other entities in the ecosystem
- Relying too much on simulation instead of real-world environment
Blockchain solutions require consolidated business and technical planning activities to address short- and long-term needs. Successful organizations establish an ecosystem where entities build, operate or use decentralized applications (dapps) that autonomously activate multiparty value chain functions. You will have a better chance to succeed by planning for a practical and flexible adoption approach that can evolve in the coming years while the related decentralized web stack and the solution ecosystems mature and expand. That is why it is best to define your blockchain adoption strategy as shown below:
Starting with a progressive blockchain adoption strategy is a practical scenario for many organizations. Because successful blockchain adoption depends on many difficult nontechnical tasks. These nontechnical tasks take substantial effort to complete, usually in conjunction with a technical effort to experiment with the new ideas, even though the blockchain solutions may not be fully mature yet.
The short-term objective of technical tasks is to enable business innovation, business modeling and process enhancement, not to develop a complete solution. This is due to the fluidity of decentralized application components and blockchain platforms development over the next three to five years.
Also remember that a blockchain solution is like embedding a business process in a technical protocol. So business and technical design must converge for the initiative to succeed. If you are a business analyst, make sure you have good understanding of blockchain technology. If you are a technical professional, you need to learn more about the economy and business concepts. Yes, you should go a bit deeper than usual.
For more information on key adoption tasks, you can start with the Gartner report on “Planning for Blockchain Solution Adoption [1],” which was published in Jun 2018.
[1] Full report is available to Gartner for Technical Professionals subscribers.
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