Collaboration is king: technology and best practices

The world used to be very simple. Every industry, every company, government department, supply chain, municipal authority, or team within a business had its own way of working. These silos were based on several factors including leadership culture and openness to innovation but what tended to make these silos truly immutable was the technology.

Three decades ago, technology at major companies tended to be designed by in-house teams. It was built around working practices that were specific to a company or in some cases a specific department. Because they were built in silos, it was rare for different systems to interact, there was little opportunity for best practice to be spread and the pace of innovation was slow.

A brief history of silos

Two decades ago the situation started to change. Banks and regulators started to talk about straight-through processing and T+3, T+2 and the ultimate aspiration T+1: the ability to settle a security trade within a single day. Retailers started to want to work with national sales figures that reflected activity from the last 72 hours.

To accommodate what some saw as wildly aspirational goals, systems had to learn to interact in a way that had not tended to do in the past. In some ways this was a step forward, because it tended to move IT development away from small, dedicated in-house teams that worked within a business or even a department and towards third parties who could start to take a wider perspective on system development and create environments that could interact beyond the narrow confines of a single business unit.

Unfortunately, it also created fresh challenges because system designers were an increasingly long way from where the system was supposed to work in practice. This sometimes meant that what was delivered was fully featured from a system development point of view but perhaps failed to meet the needs of the people that would actually have to use it in their day-to-day roles. Several new systems were delivered with great fanfare during the period and quietly dropped well before the end of their intended shelf-life.

Data: just numbers, value and context

The situation is currently evolving again. Technologies such as the blockchain and artificial intelligence are making it far simpler to break down silos and spread best practice across industries. Companies that rely on the old adage that “this is how we do it”, whether in the retail, banking or oil and gas sector, are likely to find themselves left behind by organisations that can take data from a variety of sources and convert it into information that can be acted on.

In the case of PermianChain, this is why we are proud to be working with the Blockchain Research Institute (BRI), which is creating a collaborative eco-system where researchers, enterprise leaders and innovators can come together to support the development of practical technology that answers key challenges.

It’s an approach that would have been inconceivable a decade ago, but the evolution of the technology that most businesses and governments rely on has made it a practical and perhaps even a vital part of the development of a company.

[VIDEO] Alex Tapscott explains PermianChain and the collaboration with the Blockchain Research Institute (BRI)

PermianChain Technologies is a Pioneer Member of the Blockchain Research Institute. PermianChain is investigating ways to harness the power of blockchain technology, data science and artificial intelligence to digitize, tokenize and monetize proven but undeveloped natural resources, starting with oil and gas. The PermianChain, which already has secured oil and gas reserves to be listed on its platform and registered on its network, intends to unlock liquidity to revolutionise the way that oil and gas reserves are funded, produced, bought and sold on a permissioned-access blockchain.