Successful Enterprise Blockchain Implementation

While the original purpose of blockchain technology leaned towards catering to the digital currency trade, the technology’s uses have since grown to the enterprise level. Developers soon realized that blockchain is versatile and has more uses beyond those in the crypto world to make businesses more efficient.

The tech used in business processes is called enterprise blockchain. Enterprise blockchain has the potential to boost transparency, trust, and efficiency in daily business transactions, in-house, with external partners and customers. Fortunately, the technology can work in almost any industry and is predicted to grow by 64% over the next five years.

However, its implementation must be well thought out for its success and effectiveness. If you’re wondering how to successfully implement blockchain in your business, this article shares the basic steps to ensure you get it right and the potential benefits.

What is enterprise blockchain?

A business can use blockchain enterprise to streamline workflow and other business processes at scale. These include making global payments to merchants and employees, tracking goods in a supply chain, or managing documents.

Unlike public blockchains, the data on the enterprise is more restricted to a particular group or organization. But just like in public blockchains, they use cryptography to secure transactions against manipulation. Here are the steps you should follow to ensure the implementation is successful.

Identify your use case

You need a use case to ensure successful implementation, and your business gets the full benefits of blockchain technology. What area or capacity do you want to use blockchain in your business? You could be looking to streamline document management, identity verification, affecting payments, or streamlining the supply chain.

Knowing what you want to achieve with blockchain will help you identify the needs you want the technology to solve in your business. For instance, a blockchain document solution can be the answer you need to streamline your records, storage, sharing, and retrieval. Otherwise, you can’t build an effective solution without a specific need in your business.

The best practice would be to start with one use case and build upon other areas you might need to. Start on small use cases, test them thoroughly to see how they work, their ease of use, and the results, and then move to implement blockchain in other areas.

Create Proof of Concept

Proof of Concept (POC) is your business’s procedure for use in implementing blockchain. It’s a feasibility analysis of how the technology will fit into your business. However, like any other business strategy, POC requires careful planning, which involves:

  • Developing guidelines that explain the blockchain project, you’re undertaking
  • Creating a prototype for the architecture, sketch, design, and code
  • Testing the prototype to understand how the blockchain will work in your business
  • Analyze the minimum viable product (MVP) and incorporate unique features into your business.

While creating POC for enterprise blockchain, you must be ready with the result you want to achieve. That means going back to your use case to see the problem you want to solve in your business.

Select a blockchain platform

One of the essential decisions in enterprise blockchain implementation is your choice of a platform on which to build your applications. First, you should be aware of the existing blockchain platforms, their best uses, scalability, security, and ease of use. In addition, you will need to consider other factors, such as your budget.

Choose a platform with a proven history of creating effective and practical solutions in your industry and niche. The best recommendation is to do thorough research on what industry leaders within your niche are using to determine the effectiveness of a platform. It’s important not to go against the grain when implementing blockchain technology to avoid unnecessary complications.

Decide on the Consensus protocol

You also need to build a system of agreement in your distributed network. This is the way to ensure all participants in a transaction achieve consensus on a stable operation of the blockchain and the addition of new blocks. There are various mechanisms you can choose from, including:

  • Proof of Work (PoW)
  • Proof of Stake (PoS)
  • Proof of History (PoH)

Onboard partners and build integrations

The next step is building an ecosystem for your blockchain to ensure that all stakeholders are on the same page. This is particularly the case when using the technology in industries like the supply chain, where various partners have to come together. And while it’s quite tempting to switch to enterprise blockchain processes entirely, you’ll still need legacy systems before fully shifting.

It’s best if you integrate your legacy systems, especially if there are partners who’re still dependent on them. This allows you to maintain important business relations as you slowly shift technologies at a pace everyone is comfortable with. However, a successful blockchain implementation will only happen if proper integration with existing systems and processes exists.

Deploy your enterprise blockchain

Finally, you need to deploy your decentralized applications (dApps) on your blockchain platform. This is where you now host your dApps on your main chain. The success of this final stage is entirely dependent on the previous steps above.

Final Thoughts

Blockchain implementation requires thorough research, careful planning, and consulting with experts in the field. According to research, this will help you stay on the right track and avoid common mistakes that led to over 90% of blockchain projects failing in 2020. Ensure to identify the proper use case and platform to develop your solutions on.