When future generations look back at the year 2000, they might do so with a sense of bemusement. After all, this was the year that began with predictions of cataclysmic doom caused by 4-digit date conversions and ended with the mind-opening discovery of the business potential of the Internet.

What's truly amazing about this discovery, otherwise known as e-business, is how little we have actually accomplished in the past year. The year 2000 can be summed up as the period of time in which we experimented with business-to-consumer e-commerce models only to discover that business-to-business e-commerce was much more efficient and profitable.

Now we're discovering that both models are tightly coupled to each other and that neither one is a simple undertaking, because multiple business partners mean a lot of work to integrate enterprise applications.

Many people are now moving past these issues to ponder the next generation of e-business applications, many of which are likely to have peer-to-peer infrastructures because the current architectures just don't scale to support any number of possible business combinations.

Most business engagements are dynamic, ad hoc transactions between people trying to share information to create value. The problem with information technology today is that most of the applications we use are merely static representations of that value at any given time. With rapidly changing business conditions, most of our applications are out-of-date or don't completely reflect the known realities of a business relationship.

This is where the potential of a p-to-p architecture lies. Instead of being dependent on a particular server application for information, people conducting e-business in the future will be able to record a transaction and dynamically share content about that transaction with each other.

So rather than only being able to record a transaction in an ERP (enterprise resource planning) system, people will be able to share the information associated with that transaction immediately. Right now, we can capture some of that data using cumbersome knowledge management applications, but getting people to record intangible data is a time-consuming and expensive process.

Instead, if they were able to immediately share that information with their colleagues, then all that knowledge could be dynamically captured using a variety of communications tools supported by a p-to-p infrastructure. Today we already see a number of promising tools from companies such as Consilient, Groove Networks, and WorldStreet that help companies do just that.

But the real power of these tools lies in their capability to be linked to knowledge management applications and next-generation content management systems based on XML. Once these systems are linked together over the Internet, the ability to share the context of a transaction will fundamentally alter the way we go about our business by significantly expanding the richness of the information we have available to us at any moment.

If this comes to pass, the speed at which we conduct transactions will increase dramatically, especially when you consider that most people spend 80 percent of their time trying to locate data to support a transaction, rather than actually performing the transaction.

We may still be a few years away from information-sharing nirvana, but the potential is very real. And the number of pilot projects that are currently in play using p-to-p technologies is very encouraging. The question for the coming year, however, will be whether we are culturallly ready to adapt to technologies that could make what we today call "Internet time" seem like the proverbial horse and buggy.

» posted by ITworld staff

InfoWorld

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