Page 17 - FCW, Jan/Feb 2018

Although 2017 was the year everyone in government talked about blockchain, 2018 might nally be the year of action.
For all the discussion and hype, there are few use cases to highlight. Jose Arrieta, former director of IT Schedule 70 con- tract operations at the General Services Administration, told FCW late last year that GSA’s use of blockchain to automate and speed contract review for its FASt Lane program was, as far as he knew, the only proof of concept of a blockchain- enabled system in the federal government.
Arrieta is one of a handful of government of cials who spent much of 2017 educating the public — and federal agen- cies — about how the technology works and how it could be applied to government operations. He acknowledged that many federal decision-makers still don’t entirely understand blockchain but said he believes the confusion stems from the technology’s potential to upend established business and bureaucratic processes rather than the technical details.
“When you actually look at it, one of the things that you’ll realize is [blockchain] is actually not technologically that hard to understand,” said Arrieta, now associate deputy assistant secretary for acquisition at the Department of Health and Human Services. “It’s just a 100 percent paradigm shift in the way that business is done, and that is what’s so hard to understand.”
Arrieta said the shift is due in large part to blockchain’s ability to ensure the immutability of data. Such reliability and
accuracy allow agencies to con dently share and use the same data, and the technology facilitates a level of automa- tion that can drastically shrink the bureaucratic red tape involved in government projects that go through multiple and complex layers of interagency review.
“Because you have accuracy as it relates to that record, it gives you a ton of exibility to interact with multiple par- ties or, in our case, agencies,” he added.
Still, the gap between hype and adoption in the federal government remains large, and not everyone is sold on the technology’s transformational potential.
Kai Stinchcombe, CEO and co-founder of True Link Financial, argued that proponents cannot point to viable examples of blockchain use in the private or public sector becaus has been able to translate the technology’s potent activity that is measurably better or more ef cient t he status quo.
In a on Hacker Noon, Stinchcombe documen of examples — including micropay- ments, bank-to-bank transfers, smart contracts and distrib- uted storage — where implementation in the private sector has failed to deliver on expectations or created trade-offs that most institutions nd unacceptable.
“Blockchain enthusiasts often act as if the hard part is getting money from A to B or keeping a record of what happened,” he wrote. “In each case, moving money and recording the transaction is actually the cheap, easy, highly
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