India has a scarcity of blockchain deployments: Gartner

Market research firm Gartner said only 1% of chief information officers in India have indicated blockchain adoption within their organisations, while only 8% said the projects were in the planning stages or active experimentation.

According to the Gartner report, 77% of CIOs surveyed said their organisations was not interested in the technology and, or, have no action plan to investigate or develop it.

“This year’s Gartner CIO Survey provides factual evidence about the massively hyped state of blockchain adoption and deployment,” said David Furlonger, vice-president and Gartner Fellow. “It is critical to understand what blockchain is and what it is capable of today, compared to how it will transform companies, industries and society tomorrow.”

Rushing into blockchain deployments could lead to significant problems of failed innovation, wasted investment, rash decisions and even rejection of a game-changing technology, he added.

The report also said that out of the 293 CIOs who said that their organisations were in the short-term planning stages or have already invested in blockchain initiatives, 23% were of the opinion that blockchain requires the most recent technology skills, while 18% said blockchain skills are the most difficult to find. 

The report also showed that more than 14% of CIOs have indicated that blockchain requires the greatest change in the culture of the IT department, and 13% believed that the structure of the IT department had to change in order to implement blockchain.

“The challenge for CIOs is not just finding and retaining qualified engineers, but finding enough to accommodate growth in resources as blockchain developments grow,” Furlonger said. “Qualified engineers may be cautious due to the historically libertarian and maverick nature of the blockchain developer community.”

Gartner said that CIOs also recognised that blockchain implementation will change the operating and business model of the organisations, and it will be a challenge to accommodate the change.

“Blockchain technology requires understanding of, at a fundamental level, aspects of security, law, value exchange, decentralised governance, process and commercial architectures. It, therefore, implies that traditional lines of business and organisation silos can no longer operate under their historical structures.”

From an industry perspective, Furlonger said that CIOs from telecom, insurance and financial services were more actively involved in blockchain planning and experimentation. Transportation, government and utilities sectors are also becoming more engaged due to the heavy focus on process efficiency, supply chain and logistics opportunities, the report said.

“For telecom companies, the interest lies in a desire to ‘own the infrastructure wires’ and grasp the consumer payment opportunity,” Furlonger said.