246  Blockchain

in this book. The use cases can deliver business value addition for

the organisation and customers if assessment and due diligence are

followed from the start of the strategic formulation to deliver the stra-

tegic initiatives.

BEST PRACTICES TO ADOPT BLOCKCHAIN

AND GAIN A COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE

As concluded in the above sections, blockchain is a disrupting and unique

technology to benefit business on multiple channels and scales. Organisations

need to make use of blockchain technology on right and appropriate use

cases to avoid failures.

In this section, we will discuss the best practices to use the blockchain

technology for the right business purpose to deliver strategic outcomes.

• A solution needs to solve an existing or future problem within a busi-

ness rather than finding a problem after creating a solution to justify

investment. This should be a mantra for any strategic initiative.

• The above rule is also applicable for innovative technologies like block-

chain. Any investment must be to solve a business problem or to support

the business to be more competitive in the market to sustain and grow.

• A strategic level deep dive needs to be carried out on existing business

processes, the way of working, external and internal forces and inter-

nal and external capabilities of the organisation. This step is most

important to understand the forces supporting the organisation and

set a baseline before going any further on strategy formulation.

• Once a baseline on the organisation has been established, the next

natural step is to do go ahead with formulating a strategy based on

organisation vision and mission.

• Part of the strategy formulation involves creating strategic initiatives

to fix the existing gaps within the organisation and setting up strategic

objectives to enable the organisation meeting its vision and mission.

• Strategy formulation should review the existing operating model of

the organisation to enable them reducing the run budget and allo-

cate more budget on change budget for innovation. This will also be

part of the target operating model for the organisation as to how the

organisation will look like after the strategy execution.

• Strategy formulation should define the strategic initiaives. Some of the

initiatives would be to invest on disrupting technologies like block-

chain, artificial intelligence, Cyber security and so on.

• As part of this section, we will now focus on blockchain technol-

ogy that has been selected for strategic transformation. The following

points are best practices to formulate a strategy for blockchain-based

strategic transformation and a successful strategy execution to deliver

the strategic objectives.