K
Kathleen Martin
Guest
In a time of rapid innovation, customers are always wondering what the next big thing is. They're weighing how seriously they should take hype around new technologies. Personally, I have been wondering whether my next car should be an electric model. When U.S. automaker Ford announced over $10 billion investment in electric vehicle production, I’m listening — it tells me the technology is understood, stable and ready for mainstream production.
Blockchain has captured the imagination of enterprise strategists as a revolution in business operations — a new way to assure the secure and transparent movement of transactions and records. Will blockchain replace content management systems? Should it be in our technology roadmap?
When we deepen our understanding of what it can realistically do and what it will take to incorporate it into our business content landscape, then we can make informed decisions about this opportunity.
A Quick Explanation of Blockchain
Blockchain isn't well understood. It started out as the technology that supports the cryptocurrency, bitcoin. Unlike a bank that centralizes control of funds and transactions, blockchain is a distributed system of private computers across the world ("nodes"), where every step in the transaction journey gets a tag that is traceable and encrypted. Each node has a copy of the "ledger" file, a digital history of each transaction. It’s the same old ledger you find in any accountant’s office except it’s a bunch of them in the blockchain database. No one person or system controls them and — in theory — they’re tamper-proof.
The block is like a page in the ledger, building on the block before it, so forming a chain. Each block contains data describing transactions. You decide what data goes in when you make the blockchain. It can gather a number of records together into the block and then you can add a new block, containing another collection of "receipts." As changes are made, new blocks are added. Each block contains:
Continue reading: https://www.cmswire.com/information-management/blockchains-promise-for-enterprise-content-management/
Blockchain has captured the imagination of enterprise strategists as a revolution in business operations — a new way to assure the secure and transparent movement of transactions and records. Will blockchain replace content management systems? Should it be in our technology roadmap?
When we deepen our understanding of what it can realistically do and what it will take to incorporate it into our business content landscape, then we can make informed decisions about this opportunity.
A Quick Explanation of Blockchain
Blockchain isn't well understood. It started out as the technology that supports the cryptocurrency, bitcoin. Unlike a bank that centralizes control of funds and transactions, blockchain is a distributed system of private computers across the world ("nodes"), where every step in the transaction journey gets a tag that is traceable and encrypted. Each node has a copy of the "ledger" file, a digital history of each transaction. It’s the same old ledger you find in any accountant’s office except it’s a bunch of them in the blockchain database. No one person or system controls them and — in theory — they’re tamper-proof.
The block is like a page in the ledger, building on the block before it, so forming a chain. Each block contains data describing transactions. You decide what data goes in when you make the blockchain. It can gather a number of records together into the block and then you can add a new block, containing another collection of "receipts." As changes are made, new blocks are added. Each block contains:
- Data: Record of what happened in the transaction
- Hash: A unique number signature that identifies the block and its content
- Hash of the previous block: Information about the previous block in the chain allowing you to backtrack in the chain to see what changed.
Continue reading: https://www.cmswire.com/information-management/blockchains-promise-for-enterprise-content-management/
