Journal of Information Technology Management
Volume:14 Issue: 3, Summer 2022

Blockchain is believed to have the potential to digitally transform and disrupt many industry sectors such as finance, supply chain, healthcare, marketing, and entertainment. However, there are obstacles and challenges with the wide-spread applications of this technology. The special issue of “The business value of Blockchain, challenges, and perspectives” at the Journal of Information Technology Management (JITM) aims to cover this timely and hot research topic of Blockchain, the challenges it faces, and the value it brings to the different industry sectors. We received numerous submissions; nevertheless, after the initial screening and two rounds of the peer review process, ten papers have been finally accepted for publication. Accepted papers can be categorized into four categories as Blockchain for the public sector, Blockchain for marketing and advertising, Other Blockchain applications, and Blockchain platforms.

Available research suggests using Blockchain in electronic medical files to aggregate and integrate information. While reviewing authoritative articles and books, we analyzed the challenges and opportunities of using Blockchain this way. By using the specialists' opinion, completing a specialist questionnaire, using the DEMETEL technique and interpretive structural modeling (ISM) technique, this research investigated and analyzed the possibilities of using Blockchain in electronic medical files. The pair comparison technique was used to study and analyze the challenges of using Blockchain this way. The results are stated in this research. Research achievements include the design of a model using Blockchain for electronic medical files, analysis of Block chain's opportunities and challenges, measurement of the components, design and presentation of the model, and prioritizing the challenges of using Blockchain. This research suggests that the use of Blockchain in electronic medical files can reduce extra costs, create a comprehensive system for medical records to avoid additional costs, facilitate access to patient information, and reduce medical errors. The results obtained reveal that the components of immutability and the impossibility of data forgery of patient records (based on data integration in Blockchain) have the most impact on the system. Examination of the challenges reveals that blockchain technology's challenges (low speed, difficulty working with Blockchain, poor integrations between the software for various electronic health records) are of the utmost importance.

Blockchain technology is one of the revolutionary technologies in service-based industries. E-health services are considered as a major economic and social activity in the world in which patients, the medical community and service providers such as insurance organizations play a key role. In Iran, e-health services have been introduced for more than a decade, but it is seriously lagging behind the leading countries. According to the Blockchain Opportunity window, a technological and economic catch-up is possible in e-health services in the country. Decentralization, data transparency, security and privacy are the key features of Blockchain technology. Therefore, in this research, through case study strategy and using documents, scientific articles, evidence, statistics and events and opinions of experts, policy factors were presented to catch-up through the Blockchain technology opportunity window. The dimensions of the proposed policy framework were presented in 4 categories: macro policies, market, financing, and technology learning and development. This study presents technological catch-up policy framework by Blockchain technology to policymakers for using in e-health services.

Blockchain is one of the trending emerging technologies that enables immutable data storage over distributed ledgers. The fundamental features of blockchain technology, such as record and identity traceability and immutability makes it an attractive alternative for the state-of-the-art information systems. Thus, blockchain has found its way into various fields. In Iran, blockchain technology has been employed in different areas including: commercial mining platforms, secure exchange platforms, and innovative trustless projects. One of the main applications of blockchain is secure management of sensitive information, which makes it a suitable infrastructure for providing advanced control over data in police task forces. The motivation behind this research is to provide a conceptual framework for employing blockchain in law enforcement organizations by analysis and comparison of best practices in other countries and academic case-studies. We provide a systematic overview of case-studies by qualitative content analysis. Moreover, the reliability of our statistics is evaluated by Cohen's kappa coefficient roughly 0.64. Finally, the prioritized applications were evaluated by a 14 member experts panel through fuzzy Delphi method with a Kendall’s Coefficient of Concordance of W=0.711, indicating high rates of agreement among members. To this end, “trustless authentication systems”, “distributed data/resource/information management”, and “inter-department integrated information systems” were selected as most valuable applications of blockchain for police task forces and law enforcement agencies in Iran.

As an emerging technology, blockchain can be used in all areas of e-commerce, one of which is advertising. The present study has been designed to identify a dynamic model of trust in blockchain-based advertising and acceptance of this type of advertising. In order to achieve the purpose of the research, the required information was collected by literature, background review and experts opinions. In the next step, the research information was analyzed using systems dynamics methodology (Sterman approach) and a dynamic research model was presented. After model validation and examining the causal relationships, simulations and scenario analysis were performed using Vensim software. The results show the positive effect of the audience, advertiser and advertising characteristics on trust in blockchain-based advertising and, consequently, the improvement of the audience loyalty coefficient. Also, the results of scenarios indicate an ascending growth (Pessimistic: about %60, Optimistic: about %80) in audience loyalty. Finally, practical suggestions were presented in accordance with the research results

Blockchain technology was initially implemented for cryptocurrencies in 2009, but it caught the undivided attention of multiple industries such as finance, supply chain management, healthcare, and governments. This research was set out to investigate and evaluate six benefits of blockchain for marketing: fostering disintermediation, combating click fraud, reinforcing trust and transparency, enhancing privacy protection, empowering digital marketing security, and enabling creative loyalty programs. An empirical study in the form of an online survey was conducted to examine the realization of benefits in practice. The research concluded that blockchain does indeed provide promising benefits for marketing, but that depends on whether marketers use public (permissioned) blockchain or private (permissioned) blockchain, and also the ability of the blockchain community to resolve fundamental challenges and pending issues such as scalability, speed, interoperability, and privacy, besides several many others.

At this time in history that the world is becoming smaller every day due to globalization; it is important to achieve an acceptable degree of trust and confidence in any field; and blockchain can put the world on this path. Since there is no central authority governing blockchain, its decentralized nature can turn it into an appropriate platform for project management. Implementing blockchain eliminates project management bureaucracies and allows a single, unchangeable, controllable, and encrypted source to be accessible to everybody and extensible throughout the project life cycle. This approach is the key to achieve an integrated information system and is one of the important reasons for blockchain applicability as an ideal platform for project management and construction. This issue that using blockchain technology in project management will bring about capacities and capabilities has not yet been seriously addressed. Changing the management of construction projects by blockchain is just an idea for now. This study aims to identify the capacity and platforms for developing blockchain technology in project management and construction using systematic and scoping literature reviews. Moreover, it provides some suggestions about the development and improvement areas of this technology. The review results showed that in all areas of project management and construction, there are applications relevant to blockchain technology that confirm the gradual understanding of the significance and positive impact of this technology on enhancing project management and construction performance. According to the results, a major part of blockchain studies was focused on “program and project management”, and two fields of human resources and behavioural areas and research in project management and schools of thought with a share of less than 2% of existing studies were neglected.

This paper surveys recent publications on maritime logistics with a focus on blockchain capabilities. Maritime logistics plays an important role in global trade and an important part of the global economy depends on it. The growth of world trade has led to the creation of various systems that are prone to error and fraud, the current supply chain needs to connect and trust many intermediaries which not only increase abuse and errors but also it will increase cost and time in the chain. Hence, transparency and stability are highly demanded. On the other hand, with the onset of the fourth industrial revolution, a new approach called “blockchain” was introduced which can have very important applications in maritime logistics. As this novel technology is in its early stages of development, its applications in maritime logistics have not been specifically investigated. So, this paper takes a deep dive into blockchain technology capabilities for maritime logistics by reviewing relevant scientific journal papers since 2014. The paper also discusses and challenges the current operational paradigms and by categorizing efforts, provides a taxonomy of research topics in maritime logistics. Finally, the paper in addition to presenting challenges, identifies new avenues for academic research based on current trends and development.

Despite all blockchain's advantages, it has experienced some challenges and disadvantages. Identifying these challenges and minimizing them are important steps in advancing the goals of this technology. The purpose of this study is to investigate and identify the challenges of using blockchain technology in international markets with regard to the risks of such newfound technologies. This is an applied research in terms of purpose and a mixed research in terms of methodology. The effective factors in using blockchain technology have been discovered by the meta-synthesis method at first; then the ranking of these factors has been done by the fuzzy pairwise comparison. A systematic search was performed in the database of Science Direct, Emerald, and Google Scholar. Also, the seven-step method of Sandlowski and Barroso (2007) was applied. All the related articles and the challenges of using blockchain in international markets were identified and coded. The comparison method between the two coders was used to adjust the reliability and the kappa coefficient was used to calculate the correlation coefficient between the two codes. The findings of the extracted sources were finally proposed and 41 challenges were classified into 6 categories of technical, educational, structural, market, infrastructure and legal which divided in both internal and external areas.

The blockchain's immutability has allowed previously centralized operations to operate in a new way. The possibility of applications having a new architecture is given thanks to the innovative properties of the technology, which brought alternative control designs for distributed systems and allowed applications to work without the need for a central controlling point. The expansion of blockchain to other areas beyond cryptocurrencies has shown the need for applications to implement solutions to deal with corrective operations. Blockchain 3.0 applications bring new solutions for business needs. However,  as opposed to immutability, the revoking functionality is much more complex to be implemented in this type of architecture, but paramount to applications resilience, allowing faulty or invalid information to be revoked, ensuring thus that the blockchain can still be trusted. This work assesses and discusses revocation mechanisms to contribute to the technical feasibility of several applications, which require corrective operations. We present a model in the academic area, which can be replicated for other types of systems in other areas.

Although Blockchain can significantly change the future of ERP systems as an innovative tech-nology, few researchers have gone into the details of this development. Most have given an overview of the changes ahead. Therefore, in this research, we have tried to use the method of Exploratory Content Analysis (ECA) by reviewing more than three hundred scientific articles in the field of Blockchain to analyze the effects of this technology on ERP system modules such as supply chain management, maintenance, finance, project management, manufacturing, and hu-man capital management. The result of this exploratory research is an architectural model for a blockchain-based ERP system. The researchers describe the functions of this system carefully, and the role of supporting technologies such as Smart Contract, IoT, Digital Wallet, Cloud Com-puting, and Building Information Model is clarified. We genuinely believe that this research could use as a reference model for ERP vendors and researchers in information systems and business process management