Of all the La La Land silliness amidst the now-subsiding blockchain hype, the words that irritated me the most were “smart contract” and “oracle”.

These terms are silly because there are already perfectly good words to describe them (if you’re a geek like me, try “stored procedure” and “memo cache”. If you want to add “digital signing”, please go ahead).

They are irritating partly because they reveal the hubris of the innumerable blockchain experts clogging up businesses everywhere, especially in the finance sector.

But also, these high-falutin words hide the core value of blockchain technology, which is rather straightforward: tamper-proof, append-only data.

My obsession is, of course, bringing machines together - or to put it another way, systems integration.

The cost of integration is, as I have asserted many times before, easily the greatest cause of IT expenditure globally.

From the bank with tens of thousands of IT staff, still struggling to automate network infrastructure upgrades; to the reinsurance firms wrestling with automation or smart policies - the same problem exists, just seen through many different lenses.

Ask the Right Question

The people tasked with dealing with those specific problems are usually not equipped to step back and see the root cause of why these things have become difficult. So often the wrong questions are asked, and that’s why the answers don’t come easily.

This corporate inability to step back and ask the right questions is also true of the three incoming tech waves of the last couple of years too - being the Internet of Things, Blockchain, and now Artificial Intelligence.

Get the Right Answer

There’s no problem at all with any of these tech innovations, per se. The problems are all about systems integration - or how to deliver their value given the huge swamp of systems already clogging up today’s large enterprises.

Follow Jacoby on Twitter.