Commercializing Blockchain

9What Makes It Work? Blockchain Best Practice

What makes Blockchain technology work? This is a question I often receive and the answer is the same as any new project or idea: follow the usual principles of best practice transformation, development, and project management. Just because the solution is Blockchain technology does not mean there is a different transformation process.

Using the basic principle that you already have in place within your enterprise will be the key to unlocking the best practice for Blockchain technology in your enterprise. In this chapter, I will concentrate on the key areas specifically related to Blockchain technology to be successful – these are over and above your current transformation best practice.

Consensus

I have already covered consensus in the early chapters, but want to discuss further here as I believe this is critical to the success of Blockchain technology use cases.

Consensus involves agreeing at the start of a project how the participants in the Blockchain network wish to work together; i.e. how the data will be entered into the Blockchain in a way that all parties are happy with that data quality. This will not eliminate mistakes, but it will help develop trust between all the parties that the data is correct and can be used for analysis or other purposes agreed by the network.

Agreeing the consensus rules at the start is hard, but it gets easier with time and also as the different consensus principles become more and more common. ...