Roadmap on Blockchain Transformation for Organizations – Evaluation through Teaching

Abstract

Even though blockchain technology is currently a widely discussed topic, it is hard to get a straightforward overview or understanding of this topic. For many organizations blockchain causes excitement about the opportunities for innovation but raises also doubt and fear of losing their competitiveness. Most managers have heard of blockchain technology before and feel the pressure to go with the market and implement the technology. However, most organizations do not know how to develop their company towards blockchain. The lack of knowledge includes how to build up knowledge, launch a suitable project, finding a use case that matches the organization, aligning it with their strategy, which kind of blockchain to focus on and how to start a business transformation. As a part of a research project about blockchain teaching and business transformation, a roadmap was developed that aims to support organizations in their transformation towards blockchain technology and in understanding the potentials of this new technology. This artifact was then evaluated through a proof-of-concept by gathering data on relevance and practical applicability of the roadmap. This was done by using the roadmap in a university class environment and an industry questionnaire. With the evaluation of the artifact in a class environment, a current state-of-the-art topic could be taught to students and, additionally, the learning process of the students enabled research contributions to the project results.