Some background reading from Nicole Radziwill:
Blockchain and Quality – Quality and Innovation
Extract:
“Why is Blockchain Potentially Useful for Quality Assurance?
In addition to enhancing provenance and traceability, one of the biggest envisioned applications of blockchain databases is to support machine to machine transactions. As intelligent agents grow in complexity and are trusted to handle more tasks, and as the Internet of Things (IoT) expands, there needs to be a high-quality record of how those objects and agents interact with other objects and agents – and with humans. Blockchain could also be used to support new business models like decentralized energy markets, where you can consume energy from the local power plant, but also potentially generate your own and contribute the excess energy to your local community for a fee. It could potentially transform middleware as well, which is software that allows different software systems to communicate with one another. (A long time ago, someone told me that it’s like “email for applications” – they can send messages to one another so they know how to react, for example, when a company receives an order and several systems need to be alerted that the order has arrived.)
In principle, transactions logged to a blockchain make it impossible to defraud participants in the process, and impossible to manipulate records after they are recorded. They are self-auditing and fully traceable. Blockchain won’t make quality assurance, tracking, or auditing EASY, but you should expect it to make the business landscape different – new business models will be possible, and it will be possible to entrust intelligent agents with more tasks.
Blockchain can help us ensure that stated and implied needs are met, and do it in such a way that the integrity of our data is assured simply by its presence. But we’re not there yet. Developers still need to implement simple, demonstrable use cases to make it easier for managers and executives to map these technologies onto specific business needs. In addition, blockchain is slow compared to relational database systems, so this needs to be addressed as well before widespread adoption.”
A balanced summary, I suggest, of where Blockchain currently stands in gaining our confidence.
John
Blockchain and Quality – Quality and Innovation
Extract:
“Why is Blockchain Potentially Useful for Quality Assurance?
In addition to enhancing provenance and traceability, one of the biggest envisioned applications of blockchain databases is to support machine to machine transactions. As intelligent agents grow in complexity and are trusted to handle more tasks, and as the Internet of Things (IoT) expands, there needs to be a high-quality record of how those objects and agents interact with other objects and agents – and with humans. Blockchain could also be used to support new business models like decentralized energy markets, where you can consume energy from the local power plant, but also potentially generate your own and contribute the excess energy to your local community for a fee. It could potentially transform middleware as well, which is software that allows different software systems to communicate with one another. (A long time ago, someone told me that it’s like “email for applications” – they can send messages to one another so they know how to react, for example, when a company receives an order and several systems need to be alerted that the order has arrived.)
In principle, transactions logged to a blockchain make it impossible to defraud participants in the process, and impossible to manipulate records after they are recorded. They are self-auditing and fully traceable. Blockchain won’t make quality assurance, tracking, or auditing EASY, but you should expect it to make the business landscape different – new business models will be possible, and it will be possible to entrust intelligent agents with more tasks.
Blockchain can help us ensure that stated and implied needs are met, and do it in such a way that the integrity of our data is assured simply by its presence. But we’re not there yet. Developers still need to implement simple, demonstrable use cases to make it easier for managers and executives to map these technologies onto specific business needs. In addition, blockchain is slow compared to relational database systems, so this needs to be addressed as well before widespread adoption.”
A balanced summary, I suggest, of where Blockchain currently stands in gaining our confidence.
John
