Digital Transformation is Business Transformation

Ashish Bansal, Director - ERP Operations, Asia-PAC, GlaxoSmithkline Pharmaceuticals Ltd.

Blockchain is one of the most revolutionary tech-industry disruption in the recent past. This emerging technology have pool of opportunities for corporates, institutions and for technology professionals for business enhancement and paves the way for new job opportunities.

Proven use-case and key differentiators

The key differentiators for Blockchain technology is its decentralized mechanism, its openness and availability over the public platform, availability of permissioned (private Blockchain) and permissionless (public Blockchain) option, smart contracts and its lightning speed of transaction. There are some clear and important used cases for various companies and industries for Blockchain in India across Healthcare, Pharma, Insurance, Education, Finance, Gaming, Real estate and even to supply chain, I literally mean almost everywhere.

a.       Healthcare, Pharma and Insurance – In Insurance sector, Smart contracts is an answer to its customers and insurers to manage claims in a truly transparent and secure manner. All contracts and claims could be recorded on the Blockchain and validated by the network, which would eliminate invalid claims. While in Healthcare and Pharma, the data that is suitable for Blockchain would include general information like age, gender, and potentially basic medical history data like immunization history or vital signs. None of this should be able to identify any particular patient that can be accessed by numerous individuals without undue privacy concerns.

b.      Financial Services – Blockchain has the potential to speed up back office settlement systems, increase efficiency and reduce costs. It can be used for seamless international payments, Capital Markets, Trade Finance, Money Laundering Protection, Regulatory Compliance and Audit and for Peer-to-Peer transactions etc.

c.       Gaming World – With Blockchain, Gamers get the advantage of true ownership while the assets are tied to an individual's Blockchain address rather than accessed from a centralized game server as happening today, transparency through Blockchain explorers to confirm total supply of various game assets, and interoperability by being read from a decentralized public ledger, Blockchain assets are open for any developers to integrate into their own game via Blockchain if they choose to.

d.      Government Services – Various government agencies can use Blockchain for extensively large Record Management, Identity Management, periodic Voting, Taxes and Legislation/ Compliance/ Regulatory Oversight etc.

 
How to start a Blockchain journey?

a)      Employees should be motivated to start off by self-training, learning the basics of Blockchain. They can begin this by joining various Blockchain communities and visiting Bitcoin forums on Reddit, crypto vlogs on YouTube and Blockchain news.

b)      Choose the online learning partner amongst Pluralsite, Udemy and Coursera etc. to name a few for structured learning programs.

c)       Instructor-led-classroom trainings by experts to answer company specific business cases and user challenges would get them ready to start exploring the PoC and get going with building the R&D labs.

d)      If one wants to go big and fast, do not shy away from keeping a consulting arm or contract skilled workforce ready.

Spreading awareness about this technology from scratch may appear as a daunting task, but if an organization has workforce with some preliminary knowledge about programming languages, coding, and data structure, it will become more comfortable to learn about this technology.