Whereas most technologies tend to automate workers on the periphery doing menial tasks, blockchains automate away the center. [ Instead of putting the taxi driver out of the job, blockchain puts Uber out of the job and lets the taxi drivers work with the customer directly] …Vitalik Buterin

As many companies now are exploring blockchain solution beyond the world of finance, there seems to be a big challenge for big old enterprise to adopt blockchain for business problems they have solved over the years with technology that has emerged so far. While many compare blockchain as a game changing technological innovation such as internet itself, and with that analogy it may take as long as it took for companies to adopt internet as a a distributed way to share information. Or, may be, not as long as the adoption of internet because so much has changed in the past twenty years and internet is not just a tool for freedom of publishing content but of doing business and e-commerce in a strong digitally integrated ecosystem.

The question many ask and it can be seen with the adoption areas, is that, why Blockchain has found its use mainly in the areas that directly impacts people. Quite evident which directly relates decentralization of power (or anything) to the social impact it brings. While intermediaries do a good job at being an aggregator or collector of services providing “ease” to the customers, with blockchain customers can have the same ease without the intermediaries. What fun!

Going back to enterprise reluctancy of blockchain, i will try to focus on why is that so and what enterprise should do. The below is based on my experience with working on blockchain solution for clients, discussions on blockchain forums/consortiums, and one on one meetings with early adopters that have gone beyond the POC phase and see value.

1. Blockchain is not solution for a problem
   Please know that blockchain is not a tool or solution to one or specific problem. It’s a different way of doing business and interacting with everyone you do business with. Different aspect of blockchain can bring different type of value that you can use.
   As an example, Decentralization is not about storing multiple copies of the ledger or writing to the same ledger but its the dissemination of power and decision making. As an enterprise you may not decentralize everything but you can definitely look at process within your organization that has multiple stakeholders for inter-company transaction or in multiple country offices etc.
   i do not wish to write about what decentralization or having shared ledger or smart contracts can do and why it should be used but that the fact that all of these are powerful and allows enterprise to transact in the fashion not possible before. Just having a shared and common source of truth removes the issues and complexity of thousands of point to point EDI’s that has been the backbone of information sharing in the B2B space. I have managers argue that we can get the same visibility with EDI’s and so why use blockchain? Given that we can easily compare the two and create a list of benefits of using blockchain but a simple response that comes to my mind comes is, business can share information with email and excel sheets ( some small businesses that cant invest in EDI’s still do), why use EDI?
   Provenance – Yes, you can prove the origin today by spending hours and days depending on the complexity of the product within your internal company systems and external suppliers systems etc. but how about doing it elegantly where not only the origin of the product is easily traceable but also you can trust the data because you know someone/some system vouched for the data to be true along with the history of certifications, test results and conformations. And all this is done today within different systems, different parties with partial data and certifications stored somewhere with multiple version and often times involves many people to tell which one is correct and what to use. Some may say they do no need to prove the origin all the time but only when there is bad product/recalls and stuff like that so why use blockchain. And there is an easy answer, the solution will pay for itself just for the cases when you need provenance however, building this ecosystem or being part of the ecosystem opens up to new possibilities of things you can do with the data you get access to like never before. The visibility part is huge and i will leave it up to you to explore what you can do when you get visibility of things happening outside of your +-2 level of B2B commerce. Just know that ‘data is the new currency of the 21st century’!
   You may be wondering why i haven’t talked about ‘trust’ so far. While trust for an enterprise solution is different than solving a byzantine problem because you’re not solving a double spend problem however i say you still need trust. Not the trust that there are bad actors but trust that every actor in the B2B/B2C environment provides good data which is backed by a new way of data validation proven by location, IOT sensors and human authority.
   How about data shared by connected cars or connected systems, we need two things definitely more than others. One, that the data is coming from the car or device and we can trust the data and that every cars writes it to the blockchain so that the data is available and could be consumed by other cars as well. This is also referred to as the integration of DLT and MaaS ( Mobility as a Service). The only reason for me to divert a little here and give another example is to help you think in the direction of how DLT’s and data based services will create business values.
2. Always easy to automate the periphery
   While DLT solution shakes the center more than periphery given the nature of what it does or has potential to the businesses, often times, it is harder to be entertained by enterprises. However, it is not always necessary to completely disrupt to use an innovative solution but the likelihood of that is more in some cases (like the Automotive industry). The reality remains that this type disruption will be in stages and take years, enterprises have already come up with many use cases relevant to them and exploit the technology for immense benefit it brings in. Going back to the internet analogy, enterprise know and has proven that just like a LAN solution that uses internet technology is beneficial, blockchain can be used for their many internal purposes where it makes sense (look out for why you should or should not have a blockchain solution).
3. I can do it but what about others in the network
   There is no denying that this is the collaboration challenge that will take time once organization start to realize the benefit of working together and sharing data than working in silos. Consortiums and some players are already working on solution to include multiple partners in the network. Players, Governance, payments, models will come up and get better but that’s with every new thing. if you see a benefit, go ahead and you can always integrate. Start small which means developing a network with your intra-company players and include other external players as you go. Starting on a blockchain journey is important to understand what DLT can do to you.
4. So many networks, sounds like a mess
   It will be a mess but there are solution to talk to multiple blockchain and a lot of research and solutions are underway to help DLT’s interoperability. Don’t worry, focus on business value. leave this to the techies.
5. Hype versus reality
   Not my area to discuss what was the hype but know that Blockchain is not Bitcoin and vice versa. Bitcoin is the first implementation of blockchain and has huge potential to disrupt the financial world to the point where we will not need banks and bitcoin will be the one globally used people owned currency – and i am very excited to see that happen in my lifetime (if it does)
   The rest of the hype and value of bitcoin are for speculators.

Conclusion
To those enterprise that are late adopters and want to see the technology go through its challenge and proving curve, this one is not for that. Start a blockchain project to learn this new way of doing business. I like the idea of creating a small startup company and culture within big organization to lead fast pace growth if you desire to be part of one.