Inter-organizational networks: Stringing wires across administrative boundaries

This work discusses four categories of network application, each of which provides a different range of capabilities to external users and a different degree of control over external-usage to an organization, and speculates on a number of public-policy questions that inter-corporate network interconnection will pose.

Abstract

The fundamental difference between computer-communication networks that operate across administrative boundaries and more traditional interorganizational communication modes is that a user in one organization can cause some event to occur automatically within the domain of another organization, without any human intervention or auditing. We discuss four categories of network application, each of which provides a different range of capabilities to external users and a different degree of control over external-usage to an organization. We generalize on the organizational-policy issues identified in these four categories and provide an example of a policy problem that arises across the full spectrum of network applications, the pairwise connection problem. We then describe the concerns that might commonly arise across two types of administrative boundary, budget and proprietary; for example, cost accounting, security, and control of transit. We also comment on the difficulty of employing existing technical mechanisms to implement policy controls in gateways. Of the three arenas of inter-organizational network activity that we describe, the research-center/university arena employs the most sophisticated technology and applications. We attribute the relative intensity of organizational-policy problems encountered in this arena to the degree of integration of each participating organization's internal facilities with its external-communication facilities. Similarly, we speculate that the absence of such integration in existing industry-wide and supplier-customer communication arenas partially accounts for the rarity with which organizational-policy problems have been encountered to date. We conclude by speculating on a number of public-policy questions that inter-corporate network interconnection will pose: in particular the implications for public versus private telecommunications services, and the implications for competition and/or cooperation among firms.