The Practicality of Adopting Blockchain-Based Distributed Identity Management in Organisations: A Meta-Synthesis

Blockchain has become an irresistible disruptive technology with the potential to innovate businesses. Ignoring it may in itself result in a competitive disadvantage for organisations. Except for its original financial application of cryptocurrency, more applications are being proposed, the most common being supply chain management and e-voting systems. However, less focus is made on information and cybersecurity applications of blockchain, especially from the enterprise perspective. This paper addresses this knowledge gap by exploring blockchain as a use case for identity management in the context of an organisation. The paper gives a comprehensive background aiming at understanding the topic, including understanding whether claims made around it, especially blockchain’s potential to address identity management challenges, are based on facts or just a result of hype. Meta-synthesis was used as a research methodology to summarise the 69 papers selected qualitatively from reputed academic sources. The general trend shows theoretical evidence supporting some of the claims made but not necessarily friendly to the enterprise context. The study reveals a promising but immature state of blockchain, consequently questioning whether adopting blockchain-based distributed identity management in organisations is fully practical. A research model called TOE-BDIDM is proposed to guide further investigation.