Blockchain has gotten lots of buzz in the past couple of years, and with the announcement that Amazon (along with other major players) is making it simpler for companies to adopt it, the buzz will only increase. I attended the Paperless Lab Academy in Milan earlier this year, and blockchain was discussed as an emerging technology with the potential to improve data integrity for regulated companies. Blockchain offers the ability to preserve the provenance of data transfers, by retaining its transfer history internally in the blockchain. It also uses multiple servers to create a trusted transfer. These are great features that could be useful.
But if you are adopting blockchain to fix your data integrity gaps, please consider: blockchain is not the Data Integrity Saviour you are seeking. Why? Because most data integrity is lost at the point of data collection. Let that sink in, because it is critical that you get the impact of that statement. Now, follow it with one more: data integrity is at risk whenever humans interact with data. How will blockchain improve either of those? It cannot. Yes, data integrity improvements can be gotten by improving the configuration of your computer systems. Neither blockchain, nor the perfect computer system (if such a system ever existed) can fix the employee who is allowed–even encouraged–to re-weigh an item until they get the value they want or manipulate a calculation until the final answer passes a specification. Blockchain can preserve the history indicating that person created the value, but minus the ability to detect this bad behavior, no data integrity improvement is made with blockchain deployment.
So while I do believe blockchain has future potential to preserve data provenance, I do not anticipate any improvement in the integrity of data coming from our business operations. To improve data integrity, we still have to do it the hard way: remove humans from the process wherever possible, tighten up transactions where humans and machine interface, develop reports that look for suspicious behaviors that warrant human review, and create a culture where people are not pushed into/rewarded for bad behaviors.
Originally published by Mark Newton (Principal) on 16 May 2018