DC Velocity - January 2018

BY MARK B. SOLOMON, EXECUTIVE EDITOR – NEWS

EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES
Technology

CORPORATE CIOs AREN’T SHRINKING VIOlets when competing for budget dollars. If it walks, talks, or quacks technology, they’ll push ROI (return on investment) projections and lobby hard for the stuff. But mention the word “ blockchain” and the CIOs’ attitudes suddenly get adjusted.

They become Star Trek’s stone-cold Mr. Spock to the
emotional Captain Kirk, forced to tamp down the
demands of their besotted CEOs to “get me some block-
chain!”
Part of the caution stems from the notion that the
CIOs’ bosses have no idea what a blockchain is or what it
does. A blockchain is not a product, service, or database.
It is a process, one with enormous promise but whose
broad uptake is far from assured. It was first utilized to
support the Bitcoin cryptocurrency, which buyers and
sellers use to execute transactions outside of the normal
banking ecosystem. But leveraging a blockchain across
multiple industries, while certainly feasible, will require
much work, robust collaboration between many parties,
and a challenging transition to what could end up being
different sets of laws and regulations.

“Managing expectations will be critical over the next two years as CIOs try to rein in CEOs who don’t understand blockchain but are sold on its potential,” Ken Craig, senior vice president, special projects for Birmingham, Ala.-based McLeod Software, a trucking software provider, told a meeting of the executive council of the “Blockchain in Trucking Alliance” (Bi TA), an industry standards group, in mid-November in Atlanta.

Craig co-founded BiTA with Craig Fuller, founder of TransRisk, the first futures market for truckload spot-market pricing, which had its coming-out party in late October.

Given the blockchain’s superheated hype, expectation management could be a tall order. According to Fuller, 561 companies have applied to join Bi TA, a number he reckons makes the group the largest vertical involved in blockchain. About one-third of the applicants have interests that extend beyond trucking, Fuller said. There is little doubt that many are IT (information technology) firms exploring profitable ways to reverse trucking’s reputation as a technological backwater and bring it into the 21st century. There is also keen interest in how a blockchain process could transform an industry where time and the chain of custody mean everything, and where the bill of lading—the standard contract of carriage—still rules the roost. About 30 attendees were expected at the Bi TA council meeting, but about 160 showed up, Fuller said.

WHAT BLOCKCHAIN IS

A blockchain is a distributed ledger that creates a transparent and indelible trail of each transaction, free of hackers and of so-called trusted third parties such as lawyers,