Business Architecture - The P2P Network Organization

Buildings around us are directly visible and we can examine their unique structure, their style the function they offer (hospital, library, palace, houses, etc). In business these views are even so interesting but not directly visible.

One very new structure to examine in this context is the architecture around P2P organizations or networks.

A normal business architecture - like that of a simple company - consists of a business process that results in tangible products or services offered to a client. Than in order to achieve this, the process must be organized by real people, which is the organization. When one employee is going on holiday someone else will take over his role: business and organization is in that sense not really different: one is visible to the client (the agent delivering the product) the other is not (one medical specialist replaced by another when he is absent).

Than, technology influences the business architecture as we have seen with the arrival of the Internet, or with mobile solutions like PDA's. Infrastructure serves as a foundation to cater for a general platform on which the various functions are served.

In P2P the technical infrastructure defines most of the whole architecture. The business of P2P is quite simple. It offers clients a service: the file that can be downloaded. In order to use the service one should subscribe to it by giving an address, identifying as a user, etc. The business of P2P is not at all unique. The main process is exactly similar to the delivery of a newspaper: a client subscribes to a news agency and receives the content.

Then the implementation of the business process is what makes every company unique. This is done by setting up:

- an organization
- applications
- infrastructure

The infrastructure is supplied by the internet-network. This is one basic feature of the P2P; without internet it probably wouldn't exist. Imagine a transporting structure where packages would be transported to clients... unimaginable.

The (software) application that is used is also simple: computers transport parts of files from one user to the other.

The organization consists of two main entities:
- a legal entity which is about the contract
- a human resource part

The contract is implemented in the application, and therefore hardly visible. But the idea is that to prevent legal claims, the copied files are not directly copied from one user to another, but only parts of files are copied. In this way a file at one location can not be traced to that of another. Legally this means that the copyright is skipped.

The human resource part is also unique: in this case there are (nearly) no employees but the client is also the employee in the traditional sense; he does the work himself in a DIY-way.

This DIY is familiar for internet solutions but also for home-renovation solutions.

Another unique feature of this architecture is that it is completely de-centralized: there is hardly any central command rather than the software application. This means a very safe structure because similar architecture that are centralized have a so-called "Single point of failure," that is somewhere in the center.

P2P may be seen as a fraud, business architecture-wise it is a very unique solution that will be exemplary for new organizational forms in the near future. Organizations could learn from it.

Soon we will learn what happened to it, whether it will be transformed into a new P4P structure or that it will fade or transform to something else...