How Can I Help You on the Bleeding Edge of Technology

How can I help you on the bleeding edge of technology?

The rate of change of technology continues to accelerate. There isn’t a lot of time between the onset of the latest and greatest thing, and the moment it’s critical to decide whether or not you are going to adopt it. I’ll use Blockchain as the example here because it’s a couple of years old - almost ancient in the current pack of temptations.

When technology first comes out, the development community has an idea of what they want.Blockchain was all about crypto currencies - an electronic form of currency that was safe, secure, and anonymous. Over time, the existence of a transactional network that offered secure, immutable and final transactions with proof of provenance became a more general tool. Today, there are many crypto currencies but there are also trading currencies handled by national banks, there are trade consortia for tracking diamonds or food or shipments. And there are smart contracts that can be activated on the transactions, allowing variability depending on an agreed contractual arrangement — for example, food deliveries won’t be accepted if they aren’t kept at an appropriate temperature and delivered within a contractually obligated time frame. 

The trouble is the emergent technology becomes highly attractive without a corresponding level of understanding. There’s a lot of press, a lot of hype, and deploying the technology can offer a tempting edge in marketing your brand. However, there’s often little sense it how the technology is deployed – it becomes a square peg forced into a round hole, with high business costs and little (or negative) value in return. 

My role is to work with you, help you determine if the new technology makes sense for your business need, and to help you develop a plan for deploying it where it makes sense. In the Blockchain example, it’s pretty easy to decide if it’s worth any time on your behalf. Just ask 3 questions:

1. Is there a business problem to be solved?

2. Is there a business network of participants, assets and transactions?

3. Does the network require trust (consensus), immutability, finality and proof of provenance?

If you can’t answer all 3 with a solid “YES”, then you risk sending good money after bad, chasing the latest technological buzzwords. Even where the answers are all “YES”, it may or may not make sense. The smartest companies make sure they implement the technology they need, not the technology they think they want.

The next step for exploring blockchain is to document the exact business case and develop a small-scale experiment, limited to a minimal network and implementing a subset of transaction types. I can help with that, and with establishing similar pilots for many types of emerging tech.

Being on the bleeding edge of technology is high-risk and high-reward, as you try something novel to differentiate your business from the rest. My goal is to help create solutions that work for you, to minimize the risk and maximize the reward.