Enterprise digital initiatives transitioning from pilot to program: 57% of the enterprises’ demand is firmly around digital technologies in the next 12-18 months. Most enterprises now perceive digital to be indispensable for the firm’s long-term growth and are trying to position themselves as “digital-first” enterprises
At a NASSCOM-hosted event earlier this year, I moderated a roundtable discussion on “Blockchain: Looking beyond the hype” among executives from 20+ GICs. The discussion quickly elevated from the “what” to the “how and how not” to do blockchain initiatives.
Here are some of the key take-aways from the session, in part sparked by discussions on some of our blockchain research.
Blockchain has crossed the chasm: With the definitive number of live deployments and successful PoCs, we believe that the early adopters will be able to demonstrate early results by year’s end. Because timelines for technology evolution have compressed, we also expect a wave of fast followers will invest in this space.
GICs’ innovation can transform them into Global Capability Centers (GCCs): GICs are leading blockchain initiatives, from education, evaluation, use-case design, and PoCs to live deployments. They are also externalizing the technology solutions to create newer business and revenue models, and driving blockchain adoption at speed and scale. And their R&D investments are extending beyond live blockchain deployments to patent filings to retain competitive advantage.
Building a business case: GICs are researching every possible use of blockchain in their industry. We are seeing GICs helping enterprises across a variety of use cases in insurance, capital markets, banking, supply chain, education, and technology – and one leading financial services GIC prioritized four use cases from a long list of more than 40. A framework, like the one we recently published, will help firms prioritize business use cases that are ripe for blockchain adoption.
GICs and the ecosystem: Blockchain adoption requires significant orchestration among governments, regulators, technology vendors, enterprises, startups, and customers to create a win-win environment for all. GICs are not just consortium and forum participants; they are highly active contributors to the advancement of blockchain technology maturity.
Talent is not a huge roadblock: Leading adopters have started by building a core blockchain team that invests its time in understanding the ecosystem, undergoing training, and exploring multiple use cases. Lead steers we’ve spoken with stated that re-skilling efforts to build a blockchain developer pool have not been the uphill battle that leading blockchain consulting firms hypothesized. They’ve approached re-skilling by driving blockchain awareness to a broader group in the firm, and then identifying a pool of talent with adjacent skills, e.g., Angular JS developers to be trained on solidity, for the first wave of training. More developers join these teams as they scale up. Enterprises are conducting a series of hackathons to tap into the talent pool – both in the GICs and the extended ecosystem – and provide on the job training opportunities.
Evolution of the enterprise blockchain technology stack: Enterprises are taking a fundamentally different approach than the public or cryptocurrency related initiatives in building their blockchain technology stacks. Blockchain-as-a-service vendors have helped manage the complexities of the blockchain stack for early trials and pilot stage activities. However, early stage trials that did not plan for the blockchain technology stack for the live deployment phase have found it difficult to scale up their pilots. Node-level identity and access management, interoperability, quality assurance for smart contracts, and current scalability limitations of existing blockchain consensus mechanisms and transaction validation protocols are some of the key challenges highlighted by early adopters.
Sidechains are a key feature of the enterprise blockchain tech stack, not limited to cryptocurrencies: Several enterprises are solving the data privacy issues by creating both off-chain and side-chain applications that can then write final-hash on the blockchain network. This unique approach can accelerate blockchain adoption for specific use cases. However, interoperability on different blockchain platforms is a key challenge.
With all this, there should be little doubt that GICs are quickly evolving into global capability centers that further the digital transformation agenda for the enterprise.
As we continue studying enterprises’ and GICs’ blockchain journeys, we’d love to hear about yours. Please share it with me on [email protected].
And please participate in our ongoing GIC Digital Maturity Pinnacle Model™ survey to learn more about successful GICs’ digital journeys and see how your GIC compares.
The mobile communications industry provides a historical example of how it solved a real problem with cryptography, overcame complexity, and transformed a market once viewed as a niche into something the world takes for granted. Blockchain has a way to go.
Blockchain is no longer just Bitcoin. Medical records, claims handling, fraud checking, supply chain management, national identity records and personnel background checks: all need to access data from multiple sources between multiple entities, in a secure, efficient way.
But all technology adoptions face challenges. An article by Iansiti and Lakhani in the February 2017 edition of Harvard Business Review presented that complexity and novelty are the two principal challenges. Complexity is defined as “the number and diversity of parties that need to work together to produce value with the technology.” Successful adoption requires a huge effort of co-ordination. The more parties involved in the technology ecosystem, the longer it takes.
Novelty translates as “is this a solution looking for a problem?” In other words, does the technology solve a real problem, or one that’s manufactured to accommodate the technology? The ecosystem needs to understand the problem and recognize the solution.
With that stage-setting, let’s take a look at an historical precedent that shows how a complicated technology that required multi-party cooperation and adherence to a common standard overcame complexity and addressed novelty to make the long journey from concept to successful adoption.
In February 1987, the European Conference of Postal and Telecommunications Administrations (CEPT)published the first draft of a specification for mobile telephony, GSM, which had been conceived in 1982. At that time, mobile radio was a well-established, if niche, expensive, and technologically imperfect phenomenon. CEPT recognized that business people needed to use a phone connected to a public telephone network while on the move, and sought to improve its use in several ways.
Because phone call privacy was critically important to business users, CEPT specified a stream-cipher technique called the A5 algorithm (“A5”) at the February 1987 meeting. When the first GSM networks were launched commercially four years later, users simply understood that with a GSM phone, it was impossible for anybody with a $50 Tandy scanner to listen in on their phone calls. Cryptography had found a receptive marketplace, and the prevailing term “digital” sold the idea that conversations on the move were private and secure.
Because successive organizations that promoted GSM lined up a pool of telecom operators willing to buy, technology manufacturers organized themselves into consortia to share the risk, and invested heavily in turning GSM into physical equipment in just four years. National regulators then set the conditions for the licensing of competitive carrier models. With these moves, GSM had overcome complexity in its ecosystem “to produce value with the technology.”
Five years after its commercial launch in Finland in November 1991, GSM with A5 had been adopted by 200 carriers in 100 countries. Just under half of the world’s mobile phone subscribers were connected to a GSM network by 1996. By the end of 2008, when Bitcoin was creeping onto the world stage, an evolved set of standards based on GSM had become a de facto global standard for mobile.
Users of most of the world’s five billion active mobile phones don’t know or care why A5 was specified, that it can now be processed in real time by security services, or that it has been routinely hacked by cryptographers since the late 1990s. But in recognizing that a solution was required for an easily understood problem – air-interface privacy – CEPT had kick-started a market, assisted by cryptography, with scale and application way beyond the problem which the technology originally solved.
But, even with a highly orchestrated ecosystem, it had taken 26 years.
Blockchain technology has arrived, and proofs of concept and enterprise-specific applications abound. IBM and Maersk will establish a joint venture to develop a trade platform for the global shipping industry. Australia’s stock exchange, ASX, is deploying blockchain to replace its existing registry, settlement, and clearing system. Nation states following Estonia’s lead are considering using blockchain to build their entire e-government infrastructures.
Blockchain as a broad technology will certainly end up as a solution to thousands of parochial problems. But the back to the future lesson from GSM and A5 is that for Blockchain to emerge as a transformative solution on a global scale, it needs a single big ecosystem (banks?) to identify a single problem (interbank settlement?) and to adopt a single standardized approach (Ethereum? Ripple? Iroha? Corda? Quorum? Sawtooth? Et al?). That ecosystem must have convinced regulators at worst that the approach will be compliant, and at best that the approach is mandatory. It must then agree timelines for implementation and adoption, and stick to them.
Will it take 26 years? I guess we’ll all have to shine up our crystal balls.
To learn about our practical five-point framework for understanding business processes that are best suited to blockchain adoption, please see our November 2017 viewpoint, “Unblocking Blockchain Adoption“.
In 2015, Denver-based Chipotle Mexican Grill suffered a major crisis with an E. coli outbreak that left 55 customers ill. Sales plummeted, news stories and investigations shattered its reputation, and the restaurant chain’s share price dropped 42 percent, to a three-year low, where it has languished ever since. Why couldn’t Chipotle prevent or contain it? What triggered it?
The answer lies in an ever-present scenario companies face – dependence across multiple vendors and lack of transparency and accountability across complex supply chains. A radical solution, using blockchain technology, is rapidly emerging, and is being explored by a slew of startups and corporations.
Blockchain allows supply chain managers to attach digital tokens – a unique, negotiable form of digital asset – to intermediate goods as they progress along the production, shipping, and delivery phases among different supply chain players. This gives businesses far greater flexibility to find markets and price risks, by capturing the value invested in the process at any point along the chain.
One example of blockchain in action is Walmart working with IBM and Beijing’s Tsinghua University to follow the movement of pork in China. Another is BHP Billiton, a mining giant, using the technology to track mineral analysis conducted by outside vendors. Everledger, a dynamic startup, has already uploaded unique data on more than a million individual diamonds to a blockchain ledger system, thus developing quality assurances and helping jewelry market associations comply with regulations barring “blood diamond” products.
“Smart contracts,” an application based on blockchain technology – buoyed by advances in chip and sensor technology – is an especially powerful option providing traceability and automation benefits. These contracts can grant different vendors special, cryptographic, and encrypted permissions, can be automatically executed by an autonomous system, and provide visibility on each other’s activity to all members of a supply chain community.
This kind of provable, transparent credentialing will be especially important for additive manufacturing, which is central to the dynamic, on-demand production model of the burning Industry 4.0 movement. For instance, operations and maintenance crew in an aircraft carrier need to have absolute confidence that the software file they downloaded to 3D print a new part is safe and not hacked. One of the most compelling arguments for blockchain is that it can help eradicate the trust problem in supply chains, without which the sophisticated, decentralized, IoT–driven economy many are projecting might be impossible.
While the need for efficiency improvement and information aggregation suggest blockchain technology could deliver vast supply chain savings for companies everywhere, there are formidable obstacles to overcome first, such as:
Despite these challenges, positive steps are being taken. For example, Hong Kong recently formed a Belt and Road blockchain consortium that seeks to bring a structure and order along with ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), an international, private sector–led global administrator and adjudicator.
While it might be too early to say that blockchain entirely solves the global supply chains issues, we believe any system that promises to enhance transparency and control for businesses and their customers, while also countering inter-commercial trading frictions, is worth exploring.
An increasing number of investors, businesses, academics, and even governments are starting to view blockchain technology as a much-needed platform…are you with them?
Insurer of the future: invisible protection provider
From product development through claims management, the insurer landscape will change dramatically over the next 10 years
Although offshoring is the predominant delivery model among L&P insurance BPO active contracts, the degree of offshoring within the L&P segment varies by process
Although technologies such as AI, blockchain, and IoT can assist insurers in digital transformation, legacy back-end can be a barrier to the realization of its full potential
Key Factors
Also, bundling of insurance with products and services across industries is on the rise, creating a new breed of ‘invisible insurer’
Everest Group reports that two major trends are shaping the future of insurance, driving insurers to redefine their business strategies and IT outsourcing engagements. First, insurers are moving from passively “insuring loss” and managing claims to proactively “ensuring protection” for customers. Second, insurers are bundling insurance with products and services across a broad spectrum of industries, with insurers themselves increasingly becoming invisible to the end customer.
To navigate these shifts, the insurer of the future will leverage next-generation technologies such as analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain and IoT.
For example:
These are just a few ways technology will play a major role in the transformation of the insurance industry over the next decade as insurers shift focus from “protection” to “prevention” and as the bundling of insurance with products and services becomes more prevalent. Today, insurers have begun collaborating with IT service providers to build and evaluate proof-of-concepts, develop customized solution offerings, and test use cases in innovation labs and centers of excellence.
“We’re already seeing evidence of insurers beginning to embrace their future reality,” said Jimit Arora, partner and leader of the IT Services research practice at Everest Group. “For instance, insurers are moving from long-term, traditional IT outsourcing projects to short-term, digital projects. These projects allow insurers to adopt emerging technologies, reduce time-to-market, and improve customer experience. We’re also seeing a steep rise in demand for artificial intelligence, blockchain, IoT, and automation in the scope of insurance IT outsourcing contracts.”
Insurance constitutes 30-35 percent market share of the overall US$142 billion BFSI (banking, financial services and insurance) IT outsourcing industry. Over the past four years, the insurance ITO market size has grown by a CAGR of 5.3 percent, and going forward it is expected to grow at a steady rate of 4-6 percent. Digital services components were included in 46 percent of the 348 insurance ITO deals signed in 2016 and analyzed by Everest Group. The deals having automation in scope increased by nearly 250 percent while deals involving IoT, blockchain and AI nearly tripled.
These findings and more are explored in detail in Everest Group’s recently published report, “Insurer of the Future: Insurance ITO Annual Report 2018.” The report explores key trends in the insurance industry and their implications for application services outsourcing.
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