Page 50 - GCN, June/july 2017

Q&A BLOCKCHAIN
Illinois taps blockchain
to improve services
CTO Mike Wons says the technology can support more effective electronic transactions with businesses and citizens
BY SARA FRIEDMAN
Blockchain technology creates a shared, global ledger of transactions that can be used to secure virtually any data, which is why state and local governments are taking a closer look.
At the National Association of State CIOs’ midyear conference, Illinois CTO Mike Wons spoke with GCN about the potential public-sector applications
for blockchain and the five use cases in development at various Illinois agencies. His answers have been edited for length and clarity.
What piqued your interest about bringing blockchain into the public sector?
Blockchain to me is our next interoper- able platform that needs to be put into place to really enable effective busi- ness and citizen electronic interactions. We started a working group about a year ago with people who were inter- ested. At first, it was the technology people, but we brought folks together from all of the agencies and started talking about the capabilities.
A college student sent me a one- page paper about how she believed that blockchain could fundamentally change the way that Illinois is per- ceived among the states and change the way that we transact business. She saw Illinois becoming the blockchain center of the universe. It was inter- esting, so I had her come and have a conversation with the team.
What has your department done to spur the use of blockchain?
On Nov. 30, we appointed our first business owner liaison for blockchain, Jennifer O’Rourke, who also is the as- sistant deputy director at the Illinois Department of Commerce’s Office of Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Technology. We have a working group that gets together every week and another group that includes individu- als outside the government that meets monthly to look at the blockchain challenge and the emerging aspects
of it.
On Nov. 30, we also put out a re-
quest for information to help us figure out how to use blockchain to improve services for citizens. At the same time, we put out a request for comment on financial regulatory guidance associ- ated with blockchain and cryptocur- rency. As we got to the beginning of the year, we had a good idea of what the industry thinks about regulation and what blockchain can do for the public sector.
What ideas did you receive?
We had 21 responses from the RFI that had good data points, but we didn’t learn anything new from the RFIs other than that the space was emerging and it was hot. The respons- es talked a lot about the potential and future, but there weren’t a lot of prac- tical use cases. So we brought agency
directors together to talk about how blockchain could improve services for citizens. We came up with 25 use cases that we thought could funda- mentally improve services at a lower price point for government.
We worked to narrow down the use cases and selected five of them as proofs of concept to deliver this year. Our first project addresses property deed management. The second is looking at credentialing for students’ transcripts.
The third one is a blockchain for health care providers that validates that they are certified to protect personally identifiable information and they can provide the services. The process of a provider getting certified in the state and then getting reim- bursed is a long, structured process. The activity could occur electronically through blockchain technology.
The fourth project will create a clean-energy marketplace using block- chain for energy credits. The fifth one is for vital records; we are thinking of putting birth certificates on block- chain, making them available forever electronically.
What did you learn from the Dela- ware Blockchain Initiative?
We did model some of our activity after Delaware’s program to support blockchain use, but we have taken it to a deeper level with this transac-
46 GCN JUNE/JULY 2017 • GCN.COM