Could you define what your job role details and your day to day routine?

As an Enterprise Architect I’m charged with understanding the wider business strategy, and working with the business to define the change it needs to undertake to move towards the strategic objectives. As a company transforming into a services organisation, that change includes how we deliver services; and what technology needs to underpin them. In the land administration space, blockchain is an important technology – and seeing how it enables new services is one of things I’ve been focusing on recently.

How is your organisation applying blockchain?

We’re looking at how blockchain enables a new kind of engagement model between citizens and their land authority as part of building out technology services in the land administration domain. We have a Land Services offer that we’ve launched recently and within that we’re laying out a roadmap to blockchain where blockchain has value to offer.

What were the biggest challenges in using this technology?

The lack of maturity of the technology has been really painful – “well established” in this field is still measured in months, and actually proposing a technology stack that is workable for a real-world application is fraught with risk. So saying, if you’d asked me a year ago if the technology was ready, I’d have said 100% no; if you asked me today, I’d say about 50% no.

What can we expect from blockchain in the next 12 months?

I think we’ll say strong moves forward on a number of fronts: we’ll see real enterprise applications successfully deployed on blockchain where blockchain is being used to add real value rather than just PR. We’ll see advances in cross-chain integration standards, and simplification of the pain of running the technology stacks. I think we’ll also see an interesting “public” vs “private” blockchain debate that might mirror the “open source” vs “closed source” discussion of a few years ago.

What are you most looking forward to at the show?

My inner geek is itching to get to the “Blockchain Technology Solutions” track…