Enterprise Ethereum is a Team Sport by Nadia Hewett (Devcon5)

I'm Nadia Hewitt I'm with the World Economic Forum's Center for the 4th Industrial Revolution I'm based in San Francisco where headquarters is and we also have offices in other countries around the world and we partner very closely with with governments in different regions the World Economic Forum just to give a bit of context the World Economic Forum is the intersection for public-private cooperation we've been around for about 50 years and we work on global systemic issues we have a global impartial platform to bring together global leaders from public and private sectors so global systemic issues that particularly needs collective action to convene and for parties to come together on that impartial platform a few years ago the founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum professor Klaus Schwab started talking about the fourth Industrial Revolution so the fourth Industrial Revolution we talked about those technologies blockchain distributed later artificial intelligence Internet of Things and he started talking about the fact that these technologies will not only influence industries but it will fundamentally change what it means to be human and the world is not prepared these technologies blockchain is moving very fast governments can't keep up with regulation so there's a big gap and how we govern today these technologies so with that we opened the Centre for the fourth Industrial Revolution will be focused on these technologies to really help close that governance gap how do we make sure that blockchain and distributed ledger technology is accelerated globally in a way that is inclusive and that you still have responsible deployment we can't rely on regulation to help govern distributed later technologies we need to find new agile ways to together private sector leaning in together with the public sector govern these technologies give you a bit of context so I'm with the blockchain and distributed ledger team I lead a number of projects globally we tackle governance blockchain issue we focus very narrowly and will actually go and do deployments will co.design with organizations and governments globally the frameworks that goes with that deployment and then we will use our global platform to scale and the learnings embed best practices of those frameworks to give you an example in Colombia we working with the general inspectors office on tasting public permissionless etherium to deal with corruption to deal with public rfp's so what we do is we focus on Colombia we bring in experts from around the world to then taste the technology develop frameworks policies protocols that could help of the successful deployment of that technology in that particular field and then we make it available we open source those frameworks globally so we use that global platform so I'm gonna speak today about enterprise and how we support Enterprise development in a number of the projects that I work in we helping to accelerate blockchain and distributed later deployment in enterprises so we use our impartial platform to help many industries start blockchain consortiums and then develop the governance around how they can scale those consortiums in the long run over the last couple of years I've worked in many different industries on helping enterprises on helping industry consortiums and through that we've really come to known and understand what are some of the key barriers for enterprise adoption now with now that you have enterprise aetherium if cerium can conquer the enterprise Walt as well however what are those barriers nothing new to you the barriers are collaboration and sharing right I'm being here this week at Def Con we can see again that a lot of the technology issues will get solved performance scalability those things a lot of people are committed a lot of smart people are committed to work on that the issue in enterprise adoption is collaboration in sharing today I will within that share three very specific barriers that we've seen time and time again across all industries that hampers the lay blockchain consortium adoption all that prevents the full potential of of what the technology has to offer just a quick just to level set I'll just quickly touch on some basics of blockchain consortium so in the 2019 Deloitte global annual blockchain survey they share that 92% of organizations say that they either belong to a blockchain consortia or they plan to join a blockchain consortia in the next two months so blood-suckin sources in the enterprise world is the most typical way for these competitors and organizations to collaborate the reasons why they choose the consortium way they see cost savings according to the survey it helps them to accelerate learning they can share risks share R&D so this is a lot how we see these industries within the enterprise world organize themselves to adopt blockchain we have so for the first year in the halls we've seen a lot of CEOs focus on proof-of-concept they were doing blockchain proof-of-concept and they come away seeing value in certs areas but then many of them realized they actually can't do it alone they actually need to collaborate with their competitor so many CEOs organizations are starting to really realize that but then that is where things starts to get really difficult and that's where we see a lot of the industry F is falling over its in in those competitors coming together you know many of them have never built a system together to then try and build something that's sustainable and scalable they really struggling with that you all know why they need to cook we need to collaborate with distributed latest technology blockchain is the ultimate Network technology it's the peer-to-peer nature around shared distributed nature's you need to collaborate again organizations are starting to realize that you need to work together on standards you need to work together for interoperability a lot of these enterprises we see are doing it because they want to share research and development they continue doing their own research and development in-house but they also then share cost joint resources to do further research and development as part of these blockchain consortiums it also helped them to reduce time to market gain intelligence and other things so in working with these consortiums in the last viewers what does the World Economic Forum's scene is the three biggest barriers I'm gonna give you three very practical things that we need to work on if we want to see enterprise development if we want to see the potential truly being unlocked of what this technology has to offer these are things that needs deeper collaboration across all parties the three things the first one is and again I just wanna some of this was not new I could have told you this maybe a year and a half two years ago but actually having lived through it all the way from fine and so consortiums through to provenance of agriculture coffee mining and metals through to insurance through to move oolitic consortiums that we were involved with and that we got very deep insights these three things comes up time and time again its stalls hampers delay stole delay and actually many times don't allow the consortium the enterprise efforts to move forward so these are things that that needs to get worked on the first one and I'll go through each of them the first one ecosystem white the fact that this is distributed network technology thinking about your return on investment thinking about value from an enterprise ecosystem level is necessary the second one the focus on immediate proof-of-concept and long-term value the tension that exists between that and in lost sleep how to get to fair inclusive and well-designed governance of that block chain consortium okay I'll go into the first one ecosystem wide return on invested versus the individual organization to deploy distributed Lea to technology in a way where you truly gonna get the benefit businesses need to change their mindset the traditional way for of organizations thinking about maximum maximizing profit within their own boundaries does not work within the consortium set up if you want to truly unlock the potential of the technology organizations do not know that they're not familiar with that it's a big mindset change so going through these consortium formations we've observed decisions made in building the technology in setting up the governance that has led to sub optimal optimal results because each organization are only thinking about their value drivers their own return of investment but if you are building a solution for an ecosystem if you´d building a solution that's distributed it doesn't make sense you can't think about your own ROI you need to think about the ecosystems value in the traditional world these enterprises had to think about three things they're to think about customer desirability technical feasibility and the viability the business viability with the distributed nature technology implementation these organizations also need to understand and strive for ikan ecosystem achievability so managers need to think beyond company boundaries and think about that ecosystem viability of achievability if they make decisions based on just thinking of their own value the solution and the potential and value they can unlock is just not going to be there the second barrier that we again observe time and time again this one actually hosted last week with an industry gone mentioned in who the industry is but that actually took more than a year in making a decision on the first proof-of-concept a year between and this is a number of competitors to do a first proof-of-concept because they had this barrier when a business late consortium is being formed you need to reach consensus on the long term vision the long-term value levers but also short term value levers in an enterprise world many of these organizations are you know have to report to Wall Street they need to see quick results we've seen in many clotting consortium organisations leave because the results didn't come in quick enough the thing is there's attention many times between the value liver in the short run during this first few proof of concepts and what they sometimes have to achieve long term imagine as few of the organizations in the consortium driving and aiming for the long term objective but a few other organizations are just focused on what is the value I can get from this first proof-of-concept many times to reach your long-term objective you need to pursue proof of concepts at first that a stand alone might not make sense because you sometimes have to get initial data sources and then build upon that to reach the eventual long-term goal now you have these organizations trying to agree on pursuing that first second third proof-of-concept what does their pipeline of development looks like but they can't see eye and eye because some of them are purely focused on this one standard and proof of concept and what they can show and deliver to their organization who needs short-term quick results versus pursuing the long-term objective we need to find a way project managers need to have education they need experience in ecosystem trust mechanisms asymmetry information sharing competitive games and so much more in order to actually be able to understand how to best navigate the tensions that exist between this two so you don't delay these enterprise efforts another tricky piece with the short term versus long term is in the short term we have many business led consortia they typically opt for a technology like a blockchain technology stack but then serves the purposes of the short term value lever however the technical dependencies that you then need to think of of what does that technology stack needs to look like to achieve the long term results many times that is not then considered in the beginning because many of those organizations are self focused is on the short term lever so there's also the technical complexities of choosing your you know blockchain technology stack that can cater for both and that brings me into the last barrier that we see hamper enterprise adoption within consortiums and that goes back to governance again it's not the technical pieces that's difficult you have competitors who have never worked together many of them have never sat in the same room now building a system together having to decide about who owns the system who pays for it who's liable who gets to see what data these are difficult things these traditional the these enterprises have been involved in good sources before but blockchain there's a lot of unique aspects here that is very new actually a lot of the issues around governance that the open software open source software have been looking into a lot of it applies here as well so within the distributed ledger consortium world it will serve them well to go and look at some of these open source software governance and how they've mitigated and navigated through through this challenge a particular piece that the World Economic Forum is very concerned with here is small and medium-sized enterprises we see within all these industries and as they come together as blockchain consortium those who can afford consultants and who can afford big legal teams are the ones that ends up having a lot of leverage when it comes down to governance decision so while blockchain governance is very new Wow we will while we are all still learning while going through lessons while we are still embedding based practices and designing policies or at helping consortiums to succeed and conclude on governance that's scalable sustainable and inclusive the the small medium sized enterprises has a real risk here of being left out and if you do actually do look at value change and ecosystems of many consortium a lot of the volume and value still comes from that small and medium-sized enterprises so how to make sure you set up well-designed governments and how do you make sure that the way that value is allocated who captures the value is fair in something that sustainable long term so these three things are what we see there's a real urgent need for everybody technologists economists consultants public sector private sector to lean in and work on helping to solve these issues it's today these three things are hampering the ability of enterprises to adapt and drive for the acceleration of block 10 we need to work on this and just to end I find this kind of powerful why when we want me to get collaboration right the power of getting collaboration right I don't know if any of you remember the gut Moke campaign this is a campaign in the 80s the milk industry was really suffering and then they collaborated competitors set up ways to collaborate through this campaign they completely changed the way the world I mean I'm from South Africa at the time that the ways we were feeling from this campaign was felt all the way down in the south of Africa the way that mug is perceived the way that it was regulator school house everybody was looking around the value of look at the time has completely changed through collaboration of these organizations and for me that again just shows that in the power of collaboration to get this right for us to really accelerate this and unlock the potential of the distributed piece of this technology we need to to get and help project organizations navigate through these challenges so with that I have I'm also pretty much out of time so that's my contact details if any of you have any more questions around the consortium work that we do across different industries across different enterprises or you want to help in this effort we are looking to design an frameworks to help with what constitutes fair inclusive and well designed governance and will continue to be quite active in the space for the for the coming years and then I believe there's a QR code if any of you needed that thank you very much for your time [Applause]