Records are important in the public sector, but what’s more important is how we handle changes. This is because changes to a record in one system, might affect changes in a range of other systems, and what most governments are building to handle this is advanced observer patterns, where a central messaging bus keeps tracks of alterations and informs subscribers.
Like if you get sick with depression, a case worker will register this and a range of things will happen where different departments and systems are notified to build a case flow for your way back to work. Other systems will ensure you get your welfare and so on.
Or if you trade property, a ton of systems needs to be notified about it.
Blockchain suck at this because they are extremely inefficient.
Now the records are important too, but today, bi temporal data is playing an ever increasing part in the public sector.
What this does is keep every change on record. Allowing case workers to look up something, and get a timeline representing every state of your record.
Blockchains are surprisingly bad at this as well. It keeps the records, but trolling through them and finding the relevant ones is just incredibly bad compared to traditional databases.
Decentralisation is probably never going to happen. Especially because the public sector will never do a proof of work concept since the environmental cost would be political suicide. If you’re doing a voting blockchain, then the public sector will never relinquish control, and if you don’t do that, then you might as well not use blockchain.
So I think you can actually go through the use case chart on page 53 of the pdf and still find a lot of areas where you should say no.
I’m danish and I think half of our muniplacities as well as our government and all of our banks (banking IT is extremely similar to public sector IT except its narrow focus/range) have done proof-of-concepts on blockchain for the past decade. No one has found a good use case that couldn’t have been run without blockchain yet. I sometimes wonder how much money we’ve wasted trying to find a usecase, and it’s a lot, and I can’t tell you why we’ve done that.
I mean, if only we’ve spend all those resources on something useful.