Blockchain-Based Governance - Essay Sample

Introduction

The aim of carrying out these case studies is to test how solutions based on the blockchain can change governance operations and, as a result, make them more efficient with improved delivery of public or services, at the same time increasing their trust in the public domain. As we on a study done by Madhav Sharma (Sharma, June 2019) across various departments of the government and how they related to the public. Though there are many sectors in the economies of the nations in the world, we shall select a few of them because the results of the analysis shall apply to the rest. We shall relate the observations to blockchain and thereby identify the key impacts or benefits of blockchain to the governance of the sectors of the economy.

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Blockchain Case Study Research

The following observations were made after studying how the government interacted with the citizens who needed different kinds of assistance.

Digital Identity - Aadhaar, the identity system in India, which stores biometric data for citizens such as fingerprints and iris scans, is reliant on a central database according to the reports received from the government. Journalists and activists have raised several concerns that revolve around this system. The most critical concerns were the susceptibility of the database system being hacked hence resulting in a huge risk and, as a result, great loss of information privacy. Other concerns rose concerning the data storage capabilities of the database system. Such a system can face challenges of insufficient memory space hence the loss of enough data that can be used for decision making and planning. Therefore about these observations, the introduction of the knowledge of blockchain would help improve the identity of citizens.

For example,

In the United States of America - the Congressional Blockchain Caucus, which was established in 2016, is currently working to collect information about blockchain projects. It would help people to securely settle on their identity, hence, making it possible to conduct online payments such as payment of taxes.

In the Estonian Government, a use case revealed that a blockchain-enabled system brought an improvement to the national identity management system. Consequentially, timeliness, and quality of service delivery improved due to the adoption of the blockchain-based system. Citizens were able to complete the online payment of taxes, i-voting, and create a digital ID.

Blockchain smart contracts - the IT departments in the different agencies of the government may be able to devise algorithms that could allow the data in the blockchain to be directly shared with the third parties after meeting predefined conditions.

Digital Payments in Blockchain - online platforms used to conduct payments were subject to frauds and costs of transactions (RBI, 2017), several fraud cases that were related to debit and credit cards, and banking on the internet was registered. the demand arose for new technologies and methods to which could supplant these online cash systems arose, and that is where blockchain gets advantaged. Being a transparent, cryptographically secure, and reliable means which is immune to these glitches, it was found to save many companies from such losses and also facilitate cross border payments and minimal costs.

Asset management - over the years, due to population increase in different countries, the land is becoming a scarce resource. Consequentially, land disputes have become inevitable as government agencies identify the owners of different assets apart from the land. These are all complex, intangible, and intangible assets. With the introduction of blockchain, it has become more effective in managing such assets. In blockchains, the assets that can be constricted by investment size and liquidity can be divided, tokenized, and spread with minimal friction of operation, cost of management, and matters of security.

Supply Chain - in commercial markets, supply chains become longer and longer until they form a complex network of participants where one cannot access the other. In this scenario, supply chains become difficult to control malicious activities for the participants. Either way, it remains prone to attack by hackers, losses, and insecurity problems. When supply chains incorporate blockchain into their systems, it becomes more transparent, trustworthy, and secure to conduct a transaction. Furthermore, it becomes easy to transact in a blockchain because it creates a direct link between the participants therein.

Among the many other qualified fields of the economy that are governed by the government, these four case studies were used to answer the effect of blockchain technology in IT governance.

Blockchain Use Cases

The following use cases were derived from the case studies recorded in section 4.1.1 (above) of this research paper. They were, thereby, comparatively used to answer the main research question.

Digital Identity - blockchain has the potential to create a single and trustworthy platform for the digital identity of people and documents. Government agencies use these documents to solve conflicts o data and thereby provide citizens with the power of control on their own identity.

Digital payments - to overcome the chronic report cases of loss an fraudulent activities over banks and online payment platforms, blockchain creates more transparent, secure to transact, fast, and immutable avenue where users can transact without any losses. Blockchain provides all these through cryptography of transactions that are visible to every involved individual in the chain. Since every transaction is visible to the public in the blockchain, and all data is encrypted, blockchain can be voted in for digital payments.

Asset management - IT governance helps to manage critical information for tangible and intangible assets. However, with the state of technology such as database management systems, it is subject to loss of such information, hacking, and insufficiency of storage space. Blockchain, therefore, comes in to solve this problem; here, data can be encrypted and stored ii free wallets called the distributed ledger technology, which is safe, transparent, secure, and immutable. Once data or information has been written in these blocks, it cannot be changed under any means whatsoever.

Supply chain - blockchain plays a key role in supply chains of ensuring there is trust and transparency since these are key requirements in supply chains. Blockchain creates the exact location of objects. It also makes it possible to keep track of transactions since they are all visible o all the participants in the blockchain.

The endless number of use cases show the potential of blockchain to transforming IT governance in organizations and also their relationships. It is the core of the study, and it determines the methods that have been taken. The figure below represents the design framework of blockchain.