Autonomy isn’t reserved for cars

There has been a lot of good writing about the impact of autonomous design patterns, but most of it is focused on autonomous vehicles, and specifically driverless cars. The reason for this focus are the predictions that over $50 billion will be invested in driverless cars in 2019 and 10X that amount by 2026.

Ok I’ll admit that it is hard to ignore $50B. Autonomous cars are clearly a boon to an otherwise downturned automotive industry. However, the big story is that autonomy isn’t reserved for driverless cars.

The Age of Autonomy goes beyond driverless applications of navigation and movement to the impact on the devices that live in our homes and businesses, that manage a variety of transactional processes. Every process that lives in the real world, especially those that live on devices, will eventually have to face a big question, whether or not they can or should be autonomous and distributed. This encompasses solutions in nearly every industry.

The Age of Autonomy will be defined by a time where the ubiquity of cloud-based system architectures will be questioned. The questions, will be fueled by opportunities to dramatically cut costs and improve customer satisfaction and interest.

Autonomous Transactional Processes versus Autonomous Driving Processes

Autonomy for transactional processes means that you need to be able to not only operate independently, using the telemetry from your process to drive autonomous output, but you need to be able to communicate the state of transactions reliably, and keep everything secure. Distributed Ledger Technology is the tool for building autonomous transactional processes. Not only does it solve the technological hurdles for managing processes in a locally deployed autonomous and distributed solution, it also solves a big problem for Autonomous Transactional processes — data synchronization / replication and security.

Enormous sums of money are spent on building and operating transactional systems that are big enough to accommodate huge bursts of scale, available and accessible over the Internet 99.999% of the time, and are impervious to external attack.

These expenditures provide an enterprise system that is a central authority that can manage the state of millions of transactions, and are available to report to clients and customers “the truth” about the state of a transaction at any point in time. For many companies that transact only electronically, this is majority of their business operation and cost and risk profile.

Now imagine the financial impact to the organization, if they could still provide the same service, while no longer being required to deliver centralized transactional processing services, centralized security, and being on the hook for conveying information to clients on the state of their transactions from a central system 99.999% of the time.

Autonomous processes that are run on Distributed Ledger Technology eliminate much of the cost, risk, and responsibility currently owned by these organizations. Where did all the responsibility, cost, and risk go? It was shifted with a distributed ledger to the stakeholder conducting a transaction, often the “client” in a service scenario. However, this is a welcome burden for clients and/or customers, because they don’t need the organization to audit or analyze their transactions to feel good about them. They have their own copy of the Blockchain, which is synchronized automatically in the background, and they can do whatever analysis they need to do until their hearts are content. They can situate copies of their Blockchain within their networks, and in proximity to their other core systems. The serving organization becomes another user of the Blockchain maintaining its own copies to compute bills for services and perform internal analytics to learn how to sell more services and satisfy clients and customers.

These are just the impacts to the core systems. HyperLedger Iroha is focused on developing a lighter-weight blockchain solution that can sit directly on mobile devices of consumers. Using this architecture an organization like a bank could eliminate risky account transaction features from their websites. Each client’s mobile device could carry a copy of their accounts in a copy of the bank’s blockchain. Instead of using a browser to talk to the bank’s website, the App would talk directly with the bank’s blockchain on the user’s device. The customer would always have an up-to-date copy of the blockchain of their accounts to review, and any changes or transactions made by the customer to their copy of the data, would automatically show up on the bank’s copy of the blockchain waiting for approval.

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler — Albert Einstein.

There is much speculation about what Einstein meant, but I agree with many that believe there is a sweet spot in engineering. Just enough parts and complexity that you get the desired result. In software development a “refactoring sweet spot” is the intersection of just enough complexity to deliver the functionality efficiently. Employing distributed systems has great benefits to a reduction in network, hosting, and liability. However, in technology solutions and systems some of the biggest benefit will be derived from a reduction in the complexity of core processes.

The biggest single financial cost for many companies is personnel costs. For many companies driven by software, the complexity of core processes is the biggest enemy to their financial success. Distribution enables core processes to become simpler by being more autonomous. Instead of dealing with the complexity of a cloud-based cacophony of millions of simultaneous conversations, distribution can create autonomous processes such as one device interacting with its own distributed set of rules.

Clients always expect that your core processes and those of your competitors are flawless. What compels them to “buy” is everything else. So to the degree you are spending all your time, budget, and personnel on core processes your have nothing left to make customers happy.

Distributed ledger helps you cut out massive amounts of software development cost from core processes, especially when you focus on an autonomous, distributed design. For many companies this will be the biggest benefit in a distributed ledger solution. For companies that a software-based service this means shifting the majority of your software development from cost centers to profit centers.

“The Age of Autonomy” focuses on this growing sector of the new world of Autonomous Transactional Processes.