Value-driven digital transformation
15 min read The rise and fall of Bitcoin tells a story of greed, hope, disappointment, and fear. Bitcoin supporters aimed for a decentralized world in which payment is as simple as sending an email. They forgot that even the bitcoin network interfaces with the real world. The history of Bitcoin illustrates that to […]
7 min read Do you need a blockchain? There are several checklists to help you decide whether or not you need a blockchain. The most recent one is the Blockchain Technology Overview published by the NIST in October 2018. Others are discussed in a recent blog by Chris Hammerschmidt. All of these checklists ask whether […]
Over the past few years, the Bitcoin became increasingly popular. Originally, Bitcoin was a payment instrument to do financial transactions, without having the need for an intermediate party, such as a bank. Today, Bitcoin seems to be a more speculative instrument or even a gambling game, given the volatility of the exchange rate of the […]
Concepts such as big data, Industry 4.0, blockchains, and IoT are being thrown around by tech evangelists, consultants, and mass-media, making many companies feel like they are faced with a binary choice: go digital or go extinct. While it is certainly true the digital revolution has brought about plenty of opportunities and tech-enabled success stories, […]
Operational risks are often information security risks What is often called operational risk has to do with flaws and faults pertaining to the internal processes, people, and systems or triggered by external events. For most modern businesses, most operational risks are in fact information security risks – that is, risks associated with the use of […]
A blockchain is a technology to implement a shared ledger that is guaranteed to be correct and unchangeable. But what are blockchains for? When do you need such a thing? Why not use a traditional database? Databases can store transactions and they can be shared. Database technology is mature and can achieve high transaction volumes. […]
After IBM’s question-answering system Watson won the Jeopardy! Quiz on US Television in February 2011, expectations about its commercial applicability rose sharply. In 2016 several hospitals in Asia adopted Watson to provide advice about medical treatments of oncology. Watson would use millions of pages of medical textbooks plus data about a cancer patient to help […]
Gurus predict that blockchains will have an impact comparable to, or even greater than, that of the internet. However, predictions are easy to make. Making correct predictions is very hard. A more fruitful exercise is to study the past to extract lessons learned. This is less attention-grabbing perhaps, but in the end, pays off more. […]
On the Thursday 5th of July the European parliament has postponed the decision to oblige platforms such as Youtube and Facebook to filter content placed by users so as to block material that is published without paying for intellectual property (IP). The goal of proponents of this filter is to protect the creators of content, […]