Majority of Businesses Have No Plans for Blockchain, Gartner Finds

Eraser
3 May 2018

A new survey from research and advisory firm Gartner suggests that organizations are largely apathetic toward blockchain integration.

According to the results of the research, which queried chief information officers (CIOs) about their corporate attitudes on the technology, only 1 percent of CIOs indicated any kind of blockchain adoption within their organizations. Furthermore, just 8 percent said they were experimenting with blockchain with plans for short-term integration.

However, most notable may be the fact that 77 percent of CIOs surveyed said that they are not interested nor do they have plans to develop and deploy the technology.

According to Gartner VP David Furlonger, the survey provides evidence on the “massively hyped state of blockchain adoption and deployment.”

Furlonger added,

“It is critical to understand what blockchain is and what it is capable of today, compared to how it will transform companies, industries and society tomorrow.”

Still, it turns out, CIOs aren’t uninterested, but they are more careful in approaching implementing blockchain tech.

Twenty-three percent, among 293 that are in short-term planning, see blockchain demanding new skills, while 18 percent said that blockchain skills are “difficult to find,” a release states. Others stated that there should be a change in the structure of their IT departments for better blockchain implementation.

Elsewhere, Furlonger said organizations could face wasted investment, or rejection of a technology, when they rush into blockchain deployments. Blockchain requires understanding of fundamentals of its process, security law, value exchange, decentralized governance, he said.

Furlonger concluded:

“While many industries indicate an initial interest in blockchain initiatives, it remains to be seen whether they will accept decentralized, distributed, tokenized networks, or stall as they try to introduce blockchain into legacy value streams and systems.”

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