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The chief engineer SITA Labs, Kevin O & Sullivan, outlines the potential impact that blockchain technology will have in the coming years.
The excitement surrounding the blockchain and the benefits that its development and integration could have for a myriad of industries has been palpable in recent years. Originally a "still" for cryptocurrencies, transparency and traceability of the blockchain – combined with the possibilities for collaboration that involves its intrinsic distribution – have brought technological research to the forefront in many sectors, not least the 39; transport industry.
SITA is a multinational IT giant focused on the aviation industry and in its IT Air Transport IT Insights report of 2018, the company has discovered that blockchain has attracted the greatest attention from this year of any technology between CIOs of airlines and airports. The report found that 59% of airlines and 34% of airports plan to implement blockchain technology research programs by 2021.
Kevin O & # 39; Sullivan, chief engineer for research and development arm SITA Lab, has conducted blockchain technology research for airports and airlines over the past two and a half years. O & Sullivan, whose experience spans 25 years in the travel technology space, has been thrilled to discuss the development of blockchain, what it will get for companies around the world and what the future holds for disruptive technology .
At present, blockchain remains in its infancy. "I see a strong parallelism between what we've seen in the years", 90 when the Internet arrived, and there was also a huge outcry.Everyone predicted that this would change the world, but nobody really knew how " , says O & Sullivan. "I feel that's where we are with blockchain, I think the technology itself is relatively simple – it's well described, there's no mystery about it, but the real problems now are figuring out how it works from the point of view business and governance. "
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Naturally, such a radical and disruptive new technology calls for enormous questions about integration, governance, compliance and access. Can this technology intervene in business processes with minimal interruptions? With an open and collaborative platform, who is responsible? Who conducts its maintenance? Who has access to what data and who makes this decision? "Blockchain is a collaborative technology, and it's the promise that by encouraging partners, suppliers and competitors to collaborate effectively on the same technology, infrastructure and data, we can eliminate the friction in the way we do business and improve trust between different stakeholders, "says O & # Sullivan. "But it introduces significant regulatory problems because the legal primers of what a government expects companies to do from a compliance and auditing perspective do not work on blockchain."
With the promises of what the blockchain can offer, tackling these complex problems is definitely worth it and the hassle. Regardless of what the blockchain can do for interested parties of airlines and airports, passengers themselves can enjoy a much leaner experience. Self-sufficient identity, a new form of digital identity, fuses cryptography (writing and code resolution) with anchor points on a blockchain to essentially provide a digital copy of the individual passport, boarding pass and more. "The immigration manager can, without having to resort to the issuing government, have this peer-to-peer connection", explains O & Sullivan. "They can verify that the digital data has not been tampered with, check who has been issued and verify that it has been released to that particular passenger."
SITA Lab is currently working on experiments in which passengers can cross border control, undergo biometric checks and actually leave the airport uninterrupted. "From the government's point of view, they will get advanced information about that passenger," says O Sullivan. "They already do it, but right now it has yet to go through an airline processing system, while this shifts the responsibility to the passenger, which means that governments get the data they want, and can verify that they come directly from another government, and they do it before they actually do it. "
For O & Sullivan, however, this does not represent the biggest opportunity offered by blockchain. The noise of the data causes problems in every sector: for every information, there is a variant for each interested subject. Keeping the truth on each of these copies is extremely difficult, says O Sullivan, but with blockchain serving as the only source of truth the problem is eliminated. "This is an incredibly collaborative industry.The flights take off from one airport, switch to another, you have to do with immigration, cargo, land and everyone has to work together. friction points ".
The impact caused by the ineffective communication of the truth manifests itself as delays for passengers and additional and unnecessary costs for the airlines. By providing stakeholders with reliable and verifiable information that has the promise of universality, airport and air operations could be made significantly more efficient, mitigating costs, building strong brand images and making passengers' experience much easier.
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Responding to the question of governance when building this single source of truth – deciding who can see what and why, and who makes these decisions – is being addressed for the first time by the private vs. public issue. For cryptocurrencies a truly decentralized and freely distributed public blockchain register is needed, but this freedom of public information is not appropriate for the aerospace industry. Instead, the blockchain technology under development at SITA Lab operates under private permits. O & Sullivan adds, however, that the immaturity of technology means that this in itself does not solve the problem of governance.
Or Sullivan says that understanding who is responsible for the blockchain, who keeps it and who ultimately owns it is an answer to questions through collaboration across the industry. "You have this incredibly valuable data set of real information about a flight and the question of who owns that data, even this must be decided … Collaboratively, we need to reach an agreement on how we handle it."
SITA Lab's Sandbox Aviation Blockchain Sandbox project, launched in October, aims to facilitate this intra-industry collaboration by enabling aerospace stakeholders to develop the tools they need to manage a successful blockchain solution for private authorizations.
Once these problems are solved, blockchain offers a shake-up of the B2B space that O & Sullivan claims could rival the B2C engagement revolution driven by the rise of the Internet. "I think there is tremendous potential in the B2B engagement model: for companies there was a bit of friction when two companies are committing to each other in terms of mutual due diligence, accounting, legal structures and all that kind of stuff I think there's a chance to make it much simpler, much simpler, and so much easier to cut and change. "
Ultimately, technology still has a long way to go, particularly as the dust begins to stabilize around the frame and the challenges begin to show up seriously. "I think we'll be a little more cautious about the blockchain in 2019, and then, hopefully, we'll see some realistic things happen in 2020," says O Sullivan. "We still need blockchain to prove ourselves, we're definitely coming to the end of the honeymoon period, and we're entering the most realistic time."
