Sweetbridge Alliance has joined BiTA (Blockchain in Transport Alliance), an organization of logistics firms, supply chain professionals, and technology providers seeking to build standards and share educational learning for a decentralized future involving blockchain, IoT and new data and communications models.I had a chance to catch up with BiTA president Chris Burruss to talk about collaboration and ask him about the current and future plans for this rapidly growing interest.On the FreightWaves / BiTA News Feed: Sweetbridge is teaming up with BiTA.Sweetbridge Alliance is teaming up with BiTAChris, how did you get involved and why did your founding members decide to form an association like BiTA, rather than starting another project or product for this space from their own company?BiTA really was born out of what amounted to a couple of blockchain articles. Our founder, Craig Fuller came from FreightWaves and Sonar, which originally started out as a company called TransRisk. In the process of building out supporting media, they wrote a couple of articles and got quite a bit of attention coming from some of the TMS [transportation management service] providers in the space, where cloud software is the most visible current solution for managing trucking. Me and Craig had a conversation about blockchain and how it is still in its infancy. From a supply chain standpoint even though there were a number of companies in the sandbox collaborating doing some group concept stuff, blockchain was still pretty much an unknown issue outside of what people already knew about cryptocurrencies.The volume started to pick up a little bit in terms of people being interested in some sort of body that would look at standards for blockchain and the transportation space. So I came on board. My background is association management, organizational management and having served in a number of organizations over the last 25 years, and with the idea of BiTA the being more of a member-driven organization, Craig contacted me. That was in September, and so from September until now, it’s been certainly a very wild ride in the growth that we’ve seen and the interest.Chris Burruss, BiTA President (left) announcing working group structures at BiTA’s Transparency 18 conference in Atlanta.Why create a new organization?We got this question quite often early on. “Aren’t there other organizations out there that can speak to this, whether it’s an existing trucking association, or some other modal association, or business organization or something like that that has a supply chain interest?”The challenge with that is, I think, for a lot of organizations, they tend to be pretty specific in focus. In trucking, for example, there’s any number of trucking associations out there and they focus exclusively on that particular part of the supply chain. The same can be said outside trucking, it could be a chamber of commerce, it could be a business league, could be the Manufacturers’ Association. And they’re really focused on the policy aspects of the business. They may do a lot of best practice stuff from a business context, education, those sorts of things. But by and large, any sort of standardization effort in blockchain would get lost in the bureaucracy of an established organization, and I don’t mean in a negative connotation, it’s just they tend to be very bureaucratic.Initial interest has been high and memberships have increased quickly. What factors have contributed to this high rate of adoption?It became pretty clear if the supply chain was going to come together, it was going to take something big. You know, it needed an organization from its inception was built to cater to not one specific place or part of the segment, but all of it. Which, you know, is a very ambitious undertaking. And really, what started as five or ten original companies, probably around October has just really took off. And so I don’t know what the number is today, we’ve probably got about 2400 inquiries from all parts of the supply chain, government, and we’ve had representatives in other countries that are working on blockchain reach out to us for collaboration. And I think right now, we’re sitting somewhere around 420 member companies, and I think, as you probably know, they range from companies like FedEx and UPS all the way to great tech start-up companies that are still figuring out what role they can play, if any, and what that might look like.Since it had to be something that was developed specifically for this purpose, when we started originally within the blockchain and trucking alliance, we realized very quickly that this is much larger than just trucking, and the transportation space needed to be represented in total. So we shifted our name [BiTA] to stand for Blockchain in Transport Alliance. But now, we’ve found that there’s also the broader supply chain that is not represented in blockchain in any organizational way. We’ve now expanded the umbrella to include the broader supply chain as well.We’re not going to do another name change, I think one’s enough. But, we’re now focusing some attention on working with shippers and broader supply chain interests to bring them to the table, because while they may not necessarily be interested in everything on the transportation side, they will have some unique blockchain concerns. We want to be able to focus attention on that while still trying to bring the two sides together to work for that common goal.What is the primary goal of BiTA?The goal from a standards perspective, at the end of the day, is about interoperability. It’s getting all the various platforms in a position that from an end-user’s perspective, not having to independently monitor and manage multiple blockchain platforms from various parts of the supply chain.We decided early on that a standards board did that. We were going to be technology and platform agnostic, because we simply couldn’t enter when we did and expect companies to take a pause in their development just so we could develop some technology standards. So instead, we said, “look, everybody just continue what you do, and we’re gonna focus on a particular problem, which is interoperability” and that’s where we start talking about the technical committees and all of those sorts of things.What are the different working groups or components of BiTA and how does its event and content agenda expand to meet these specific needs of industries?Efforts in benchmarking, education, networking, best practices, all those things. And then, of course, there’s the standards component. Looking at the two independently, if you look at the community side, the think-tanks are the latest effort in that, because what we wanted to do was to make sure that members have the ability to engage at multiple points, so we looked at the think-tanks as multipurpose. It can result in white papers on issues, it could be best practices. It could certainly lead to either use cases to consider for standards or particular pain points where data standards may be important. We see that as sort of the idea incubator.And then on the standards side, specifically for standards development and the way we’ve got it structured right now, it’ll grow. We contemplated three technical committees at the outset, again, with the overall purpose of dealing with the issue of interoperability.One of the technical committees is a data formatting technical committee and essentially it will focus on, for example, if we’re thinking about geolocation data, what are the essential data points, and how many of those need to be included in order for it to be seamless across multiple platforms, interoperable, et cetera. They can be use cases, but when I think of geolocation in and of itself as a use case potentially, it’s also inherent to a lot of different use cases that will come along. Because the location of an asset is sort of central in any transaction. We expect the first published standard to come out of our data formats by our technical committee.The second one is an interoperability technical committee. It is going to focus on the universal blockchain, looking at the various platforms, what organizations are out there, representing those particular platforms, what other blockchain alliances in the supply chain are out there, what other groups that have a focus on blockchain, but not necessarily standards. It’s sort of taking that global inventory domestically and potentially internationally as well, and then working to pull as many of those parties to table to have conversations about, what are the standards of business developing, what other organizations are developing standards that we might be able to simply adopt, and vice versa, to try to get as much collaboration and consensus within the supply chain as we can.And then the third one is the Finance and Compliance Technical Committee, and it’ll focus on things like payments, smart contracts in a global sense, not geographically but just in totality. Then it’ll also deal with any sort of financial compliance matters, whether it’s around cryptocurrencies or other sort of type of government, not necessarily intervention but interest, to make sure that we have got a good handle on, we being the supply chain, have a good handle on what that universe looks like, what the potential risks are, and where we see that we may be able to either stave off some government intervention, or bring those into the fold.I think that a lot of people who have worked on standards organizations know this, but the biggest risk to the chain is government intervention. I think if government sees that they have to take a lead role in managing or governing blockchain, I think it starts to fall apart. And so, it’s incumbent upon us all, to do the heavy lifting, put standards in place that work, and that people will use, so that we don’t find ourselves in the position with government taking over.Coming off your latest Transparency 18 conference in Atlanta, what are some of the use cases BiTA organization members are currently focusing on?I think we’re still collectively in that feeling out phase. People are still getting their arms around it, there is a decision-making tree, when we think about use cases. A particular pain point may or may not be a good use case for blockchain. Ask yourself, “With all that in mind, is blockchain really a viable solution? Or can it just be done with a centralized system?”But some of the ones that we tend to hear the most about are things like performance history, and that can be the overall performance [of the industry]. It could be customer performance. It could be a lot of things. When we think about all the telematics data that exists out there today, it’s very fragmented, but what if we could harness all of that? And so, if you think about vehicle maintenance, for example rather than a centralized system, a distributed and decentralized chain of that, that could come into play on things like provenance.Think of it as a Carfax for commercial assets, where every accident, every warranty fix … anything that’s happened with that asset is recorded, and so, as that vehicle or whatever the asset is, as it moves along the line, everybody has a transparent look at that full histories, and I think that allows for better buying decisions, better pricing.When you think of that performance history, vehicle maintenance, quality assurance, Driver IDs getting a lot of attention, with the idea there being that a driver would be able to record, essentially, everything that they’ve ever done, and all the information that deals with them as a driver to follow that driver, wherever they went. Whether private or public blockchain, that would allow a driver to potentially command per diems, in terms of pay.For companies, it would also give them a better hiring decision. They would have a chance to see, subject to the driver granting those permissions, what that driver has done, and have confidence that the information is true and accurate, and again, getting back to this one version of the truth.FROM LEFT, GEORGE ABERNATHY, CHIEF REVENUE OFFICER OF FREIGHTWAVES; DALE CHRYSTIE, VICE PRESIDENT OF STRATEGIC PLANNING & SUPPORT FOR FEDEX FREIGHT; CRAIG HARPER, COO OF J.B. HUNT; AND RON PIWETZ, ENTERPRISE ARCHITECT FOR BNSF, LISTEN TO A QUESTION DURING A PANEL DISCUSSION DURING THE BITA SPRING SYMPOSIUM. (Source: Freightwaves Blog)Yes we definitely see this from a talent perspective in the future, as well as a broader end-to-end perspective of supply chain starting from the data and payments up through performance. The main question we see from practitioners is “how do I trust the data that is being entered into the system?”I think that one’s getting a lot of attention. Obviously, payments and pricing is a big one. I think there are some challenges yet to be worked out. The idea of that instantaneous payment, but then with fraud detection. Then you start thinking about things like IoT, what sort of broad use cases can we find in there? I think the whole food chain is going to get a lot of early attention, as well, for the trailer, food and temperature confirmation, food security, TM, all of those things, as they come into play with that.Again, we revisit EDI, what happens to it? I don’t think EDI goes away. I think it still has a role, and EDI gets a bad rap. It’s really not the technology’s fault, and it’s not that there weren’t standards. No, there were. It’s just, nobody chose to follow them, so I think there’s a role there, and I think EDI can almost become a use case, in and of itself.There’s going to be a lot of prioritizing, in determining which one of these various ideas can really stand up against the scrutiny of whether it actually requires standards or not.Any predictions for this space for the connection of logistics and blockchain in the next 5 years?Now that we are poised right on the cusp of getting these technical committees appointed, getting the working groups spun up, that’s sort of the first thing in the data format side, that we’ll have to focus on, is, “All right, what is it that we’re trying to solve?” And then, start narrowing that field down, and prioritize, based on where we think that there is the most consensus already.That would certainly allow us to get a little bit further down the line quickly, because I would like to have standards in some form published before the end of the calendar year.And on the working group side of things? Right now, we’ve contemplated three, one on the data formats, one underneath the interoperability, and then, one under the finance of compliance. Unlike the technical committees, which are maxed out at 13 members each, the working groups are unlimited.How can interested professionals and organizations best get involved?I would be the most interested in a working group, because that’s where the real action’s going to happen. That’s where the real discussions are going, where the heavy lifting is going to occur. The Board, and the Standards Board, and the technical committees, in no small part, are very administrative in nature. Working groups bring the real industry concerns to the table, and then, make a recommendation back up the chain.The blockchain technology community is woefully behind when it comes to supply chain application scenarios so far, isn’t it? There is a lot of effort placed into infrastructure and Fintech-style trading networks but a simplistic view of what is needed to manage complex logistics and the global movement of goods from raw materials to finished products.I agree with that. You know, that’s a real sort of crystal ball question. I’m probably a little bit more conservative than most, but depending on how things fall into place, I think it could accelerate.Over the next couple of years, I think what we’re really going to see is a lot of education. A lot of proof-of-concepts, case studies. There’ll be some early adoption, I think, but I think, probably between now and 2020, that’s what we’re really going to see.I don’t think we’ll see a whole lot of broad implementation. I think you’ll see a lot of sandbox activity. I think you’ll see a lot of collaboration, as we do right now, between companies like FedEx and UPS, for example, and whether it’s you guys [Sweetbridge], or whether it’s IBM or Cisco or any of these other tech companies, I think that’s what we’ll see over the next couple of years.For the four years after that, say, 2021 through ’24, I think that’s where we’re going to see the growth phase. I think that’s where the early adopters, and the standards activities themselves, start to provide that greater clarity that we need. I think that will minimize some of the uncertainty that’s out there, the questions about whether this is really ever going to amount to anything.Then beyond 2024, that’s where I think we’ll see it mature. I think that’s where it’ll be widely adopted. I think that then it becomes, at that point, integral to the ecosystem itself.Companies are going to find out how far behind the adoption curve they are, and how much catching up they will have to do because I really believe that as the ecosystem becomes mature, those companies that resisted are going to find themselves in a real pickle — because they’ll have a really high curve to overcome to get up to speed.So that’s how I see it in the next ten years but there’s a lot that can happen in between. When we start thinking about some of the challenges I mentioned that the pain inside is problematic at this point depending on what sort of blockchain we’re talking about but without having the crypto that is truly pegged to Fiat currency I think we’re challenged to use a token that’s a suitable method of payment.You are definitely speaking our language at Sweetbridge here, that stable currencies are one of the key milestones to delivering effective trade networks and settlements.Yes. In blockchain the word “disintermediary” always comes up and it’s true, there are going to be a lot of casualties on the intermediary side — everybody mentions factoring companies. But if I was a factoring company I would look at it and say, well, all right, the idea of buying payables doesn’t make a whole lot of sense with instantaneous transactional settlements. If you flip that model around and say there isn’t a stable token pegged between those parties right now, they could still float payment to, say, the carrier, and then settle with the shipper on the back end on whatever terms they agree to. Right now, transaction speeds, obviously they’re woefully inadequate. I think that’ll be solved over time but right now that’s an issue for payments.I think that’s where we’ll see progress first, these consortium blockchains whether it’s between shippers and carriers, whether it’s customers and TMS providers going through an educational case study period. Coming from the association side, it’s important for these players to be involved. Don’t sit on the sidelines and just wait for things to get handed down.I’ve seen it too many times over the years when discussion is being held on a particular standard, and a company wasn’t engaged in the process and then they don’t like the outcome after it’s decided. It’s not as simple as “if you don’t vote don’t complain,” right? Why wouldn’t you want to have a voice and a seat at the table when it’s being discussed? In a consensus world, the best of the ideas can win, but there can be a lot of back and forth. So I would say from a standards standpoint they need to be engaged on the working group side. I think that’s a great place to get people to get their feet wet.So how does that need for consensus across the industry inform your agenda at BiTA?Broadly, there’s an education component, and it’s our goal to provide as much content as we can in as many ways as possible so that people can learn. We are still from supply chain, and scattered across this realm of knowledge. Many are unsure and just getting into the idea of blockchain, they know it only as bitcoin or other cryptos. All the way up to companies like yours [Sweetbridge], companies like FedEx and UPS who have been working and collaborating in the space for a while. Certainly, the IBMs and Deloittes of the world are putting out material, so it’s a challenge because we don’t want to go too heavy on “Blockchain 101” but at the same time we don’t want things going over the head of 50% of the membership. So developing as broad of a spectrum there as we can, and looking to members to provide that educational content.I always want these organizations being member-driven. Now sometimes that’s tough because there’s some work that’s involved there, but I don’t want to wake up one day in a staff-driven organization that is doing things the membership has no answers to. To keep the organization on track, get the members right in the middle of it. Sharing best practices, rolling up your sleeves in a think tank, it takes a sustained effort to not only standardize but to develop blockchain to become widespread.I always marvel. Twenty years ago it was all we could do to get trucking companies in a room together let alone share ideas about how to do things better. Now we are collaborative. The first board meeting we had at BiTA, we had two parties from the technology side that are fierce competitors and so they were sort of clashing during the meeting.On the other side of the table, we had FedEx and UPS — direct competitors that were essentially arms locked and sharing ideas, working together. For me it was sort of that moment where you looked at everybody else and said, “Look, I’ve got two of the fiercest competitors in the world sitting next to each other, sharing ideas and there’s a lesson in that for everybody.” Nobody’s gonna get everything that they want, but just by taking part, it will make whatever we come up with that much better.It’s a whole new world and developing fast at BiTA, Chris.It’s not going to be without pain and challenges and there’s probably going to be some putting the car in reverse, backing up and going a different direction, but for me that’s the fun part. Because at the end of the day, if we do it right … I don’t ever want us to be in the position where an organization, we vote to adopt something and it’s a 51-to-49 percent vote. That’s what I consider to be be organizational suicide because it means, at 51% half of our membership disagrees with what we’re doing. And so it’s a constant strive to create as much consensus as we can. I don’t know what the magic number is, whether it’s 70%, I’d love to have 100% knowing that’s probably never gonna happen but I think it needs to be clear consensus before we move on anything.Yeah, it’s daunting sometimes, but also fun to take a step back and marvel at where we started and where we are now.Sweetbridge Alliance is teaming up with BiTAInterview: The Collaborative Future of Logistics with BiTA President Chris Burruss was originally published in Sweetbridge on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.