CSC Research Services researchers Richard Pawson and Jon Aronoff are to visit SA towards the end of October to discuss peer-to-peer applications, which have emerged as a challenge to the paradigm of the client-server `publishing web`.
CSC Research Services is a global network of innovative thinkers who advise top executives on the business implications of developments in IT and best practices in managing IS organisations.
"Napster, the music-sharing phenomenon marked the emergence of a new class of `Peer-to-Peer` (P2P) applications which are challenging the conventional picture of the client-server `publishing web`," explains Aronoff. "Some people talk about P2P as the next evolution of the Internet, while others see it as a return to its collaborative roots. In Research Services we see it as a frustrating but very important development. Frustrating because it does not describe a single application type, nor to a single architecture, nor to a single set of features or capabilities. Important because it gives us a glimpse of what the Internet might look like if it were in fact the easy-to-use, richly collaborative medium that the pioneers strove to create."
What`s most interesting about P2P is its bias toward spontaneous collaboration. "It is characterised by the absence of centralised control, indeed by a hostility to centrally mandated and administered solutions," says Aronoff. "But I believe the ability to form ad hoc collaborative networks will be a crucial to the success of large organisations in the future. Consequently, the challenge to corporate IS is to overcome its tendency to centralise and to support new forms of collaboration within the business and beyond its boundaries."
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