The Sam M. Walton College of Business at the University of Arkansas has announced that its Department of Information Systems has established the Blockchain Center of Excellence.
“The mission of the center is three-fold,” Walton College Dean Matt Waller said in a news release. “We will develop and establish research partnerships by conducting collaborative industry-university research; we will promote and enable dissemination of knowledge about blockchains; and we will accelerate industry adoption of blockchain technology.”
Mary C. Lacity, a professor in the department and author of “A Manager’s Guide to Blockchain for Business,” is the new director of the center. Lacity joined the Walton College faculty this summer from the University of Missouri-St. Louis, where she was curators’ distinguished professor and an international business fellow.
“For enterprises, blockchain applications potentially offer a number of advantages relative to today’s systems,” Lacity said in the release. “Specifically, blockchain applications promise a significant amount of business value, including transacting directly with trading partners, eliminating the need for reconciliations, instantly tracking and tracing assets, providing data provenance, settling transactions quickly and cheaply, controlling identity better, and enabling a security model that is fault tolerant, resilient and available.”
But, she cautioned, “The technology is immature. Enterprises need to overcome significant obstacles to transition more blockchains out of innovation labs into live production.”
A formal announcement will be held at 5:30 p.m. Wednesday on the second floor of the Donald W. Reynolds Center for Enterprise Development in Fayetteville.
Gov. Asa Hutchinson, UA Chancellor Joe Steinmetz and Waller will speak at the announcement.
The UA’s board of trustees and the Arkansas Department of Higher Education approved the center in May.
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